


The Wall - extended version

by pinkolifant



Category: Prison Break
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-24 22:11:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 81,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1618793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkolifant/pseuds/pinkolifant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An extended version of my one shot where Michael survived and Sara and Michael meet in a Pyramus and Thisbe situation through a wall of a psychiatric hospital. There will be two OCs important for the story and I intend to include several more characters from the show: Kellerman, Lincoln, T-Bag, Sucre and Mahone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own Prison Break and I don't make any profit out of this.
> 
> All events and anything or anyone mentioned in this story are purely a product of fantasy and imagination. Any similarity to real events or persons is purely coincidental.
> 
> I also finally corrected the typos in my short story with the same name. The events similar to that one shot are going to figure somewhere in the middle of this longer story but they may unfold in a slightly different way or with different consequences.

**1\. The Job**

**11 April 2010**

**A conversation over the cell phone, routine recording by an automated system of an unnamed intelligence service in charge of national security, never used in practice because it doesn't contain any key words triggering further analysis or response.**

_"Kelly," (a raspy male voice with a slightest hint of trepidation in it) "he's awake. I'm so excited about it. We can finally get a go at it."_

_"Are you sure?"(a lazy female voice, very much unconcerned) "Isn't it just another false alarm of yours? Some wishful thinking to help you in your situation?"_

_"No. Come and see for yourself." (unmistakable excitement, elation, joy in the male voice)_

_"I've got all the intention to."_

_"What do I do in the meantime?"_

_"You'll just publish the add, I guess." (female voice, commanding) "The sooner, the better."_

_xxxxx_

**A job add published in several newspapers with national and regional coverage**

_"Doctor, general practitioner, with at least five years of clinical experience. Several positions available. Expertise with patients suffering from psychic or psychiatric conditions is desirable but not an absolute precondition to be invited for an interview. One year contract with possibility of extension in a new psychological ward of Saint Agatha Hospital, a recently founded medical facility for women and men seeking to restore the equilibrium in their lives. Situated at the driving distance from Helena, Montana, in a picturesque forest surroundings. Good working conditions, an interesting remuneration subject to agreement. Starting date, as soon as possible. Send your application to our management team led by the Chief Executive Officer, Ms Kelly Davis…"_

xxxxxxx

It's been five years since his death and it should come to her easier with time.

It should.

Nonetheless, Sara is still pretty much unable to visit his grave this year, like every year, or to face other members of her extended family for that peculiar yearly reunion with a peaceful smile they are used to seeing on her face. The weather is lovely this April and little Mikey is already standing at the door, happy, beckoning her to come.

Yellow calla lilies are ready at hand.

She finds a face she needs on that day, deep in a place where she cultivates the necessary indifference in her soul.

The postman delivered the newspapers earlier that day. She never reads them. But on that day she always looks for the way out, for the impossible escape, and several odd job offers in distant places of the country are circled in red, like fresh blood stains on the spilled black ink. She doesn't know why she takes those too and dumps them on the back seat of the car when they go.

It is worse this year than it was before. Maybe because the day is entirely too beautiful or because she feels particularly alone. She is embarrassed when she kisses Mikey and lets him carry the yellow flowers to his father's grave. She is ashamed because as much as she adores her son, being a mother isn't enough on some days, on the anniversary of Michael's death most of all.

All it takes is one minute to make a difference between life and death.

A brief moment when she runs through the prison door because he tells her to do so, that second in which her hopes explode: she is free but her life is never quite the same.

She is a doctor but the more she thinks about it, the less she can accept on face value the diagnosis of an incurable brain tumor, recurring, to make it worse, as a valid reason why he did what he did. There are many doctors in the country, there are specialists in the world, to start with. And when they fail there are those weird people who eat the inside of the peach and apricot pits, jog endlessly every day, overdose on vitamin C and claim to get healthy from all that. She still doesn't believe in miracles, or in any of those supposedly natural ways of treatment, but if they could have helped him, she thinks that she could have started.

The decision comes easy to her when they are left alone in the car and she notices that she packed their most basic belongings and put them in the trunk. She doesn't even remember when she did that, or why. She fastens Mikey in the seat and tells him, trying to sound cheerful.

"We're going for a long ride."

"Where are we going, mom?" he asks her in his intelligent voice which only makes her want to cry, and her decision falter.

She always imagines Michael must have had that kind of voice when he was just a too smart kid, unaware of the future that expected him, before he was left alone with Lincoln. God knows what kind of cruel future expects her son. It's for the best not to think about it.

"To Montana," she says and starts the car, ignoring all the calls on her cell phone as the miles between her and the rest of the people who loved Michael slowly increase in number. They will all be returning shortly to other cities and countries where they live so why should Sara not be allowed to leave?

Only when they are half way across the country and she is looking for a motel to spend the night, she answers a single call from Lincoln.

"Yeah, I'm doing fine," she states. "It's just that I decided to accept this job."

She is lying. She hasn't yet applied for it. They may want someone else, with a better, cleaner CV, a physician with no history of substance abuse or falling in love with an inmate. On a positive side, she does have the experience of working in prison and that should count for something. Half of the convicts there suffered from some psychic trouble even if no one bothered to check them for it.

"Well," Lincoln tries to be positive, "that sounds great." And he fails miserably, in her opinion.

"Mikey is almost old enough to go to school, in some places," she says, failing even more miserably to justify her reasons, the ones that she is unable to outline rationally even to herself. _A gut feeling._ _What good are those? A wish to make a break._ Except that she should never use that word, or remember that it exists. Not even in her mind. Because if she does, she will turn into a nervous wreck, and both Mikey and her will get hurt when she crashes the car against some tree in a too high speed.

"He'll be five, I know," Lincoln keeps on trying. "Call me when you settle down. What is it, your job?"

"Guess what, I'll be a doctor. In some calm green looking hospital in a forest surroundings. Maybe there are also mountains nearby."

"Sounds like a nice place to visit. Where is it?"

She presses a few buttons on her cell phone, randomly, faking the loss of connection. She's unable to tell Lincoln at that moment that the clinic she may work in is in Montana. She'll have to think about how to tell them that later. Good people have died in Montana for no good reason at all.

She never knows why she kept one of the yellow flowers they were taking to Michael's grave. She has heard of traditions in some far away countries across the ocean, places she wanted to visit as a student in medical school and never did. She may still do it, one day, when Mikey grow up. There they say that the uneven number of flowers is for the living, and the even number for the dead. Now the number is uneven both with Michael, on his lonely grave, and on the dusty road with the two of them. She tells herself she kept it for the scent. The day is too warm. The aircon blowing dries up the air in the car too much, and occasionally she has to sneeze. Her vision gets blurred. The white line in the middle of the road unfolds steadily in the distance.

But the calla lilies are free of smell so she couldn't have kept it for that reason at all.

_xxxxx_

_**Another recorded conversation over the cell phone, later on the same day.** _

_"Kelly," (not so deep male voice, arrogant, somewhat altered by an undefined emotion) "what do you think you're doing?"_

_"What does it look like?" (female voice, purposefully slow, mocking)_

_"She's been through enough!" (male voice, in righteous unstoppable anger, rising)_

_"Yeah," (female voice, cynical) "I heard part of it. I'll keep her alive, and with most of her body intact, I can promise you that. Unlike what you tried to do to her in that washroom. Was it in New Mexico? I always forget."_

_"Kelly, stop it, please!"_

_"Let me pull aside," (female voice, practical)._

_"Christ, are you driving?"_

_"I wouldn't mention the Lord if I were in your shoes. He may hear you and deal out his punishment…"_

_"You're on your way to Montana, aren't you?"_

_"Listen to me, Paul," (female voice, threatening) "you're out of my line of business now. Stick to the politics and trust the others to do the dirty work."_

_"Kelly! You can do so much better than that!"_

_"It's a bit too late to say that now, don't you think so, Paul?"_

_(beep of a phone conversation being cut off)_

xxxxx

The phone rings again and the name written on it is so shocking that she switches the device off entirely. She never thought to hear from the congressman Paul Kellerman again, not after his rise in politics. She makes a mental note to change her number if by some miracle she does get that job and stays in Montana. She never did it before for sentimental reasons. As if Michael could ever call her again.

A stay in nature will do her good, she tries to believe in that. She never receives Paul's text message saying: _"Don't even think of taking that job, Sara. You've got no idea what you're getting yourself into."_ The text returns to the sender, undelivered, lost in the virtual unreality of the electronic communications.

"Mom, I'm hungry," Mikey says, and Sara smiles for real.

And just like that the world is a bit better, a place where kids and their moms have to eat and maybe have a glass of milk to sleep better.

Sara, the mother, puts the yellow flower in her hair, amazed that it has not withered after a long drive. Well-armed with a gale of indestructible motherly love, she finally dares to dig out a pic of Michael Scofield from her wallet and stuck it in the flap of the sun visor on the inner side. That way she can see his face when she wishes, but not so directly. The visor is down because the evening is crawling closer, and the sun is getting lower, making driving more difficult and more pleasant at the same time. The car trots forward, and soon they will need gasoline, too. The blue-green eyes stare at her from the photo, immobile above a grey sweatshirt, almost of a Fox River edition. There would be only one thing possibly worse than losing Michael.

And that is if she had never met him at all.

xxxxxx

"How long has he been like this?" a slow female voice asks above his head, and a hollow male one hurries to provide a sensible answer. "Since this morning. Since last night, maybe. We didn't watch him permanently after five years of unchanged condition."

The confidence is missing, the man is scorned by a woman, clearly in charge of the matters as they stand: "Nor will you do it now. Not directly at least. Only from a distance. He should not know."

"If he can hear you now, than he already knows."

"He can't hear me yet."

"If you say so, Kelly," the male voice is suspicious. "You are the surgeon."

But he does hear them just like under one of his eyelids he sees the long surface of a clear blue sheet and a blanket that used to be white, but now it contains imperceptible alterations in color and texture, probably from repetitive washing. The smell of the washing detergent is pungent, and it's most likely not the one commonly used in households. _An institution then_ , he knows. _But what kind?_ He doesn't open his eyes pretending to be asleep, until they leave. Pretending, something he discovers he is good at. Then he only opens one eye half way. The effort is tremendous, and moving his limbs impossible. It is like he has never had any muscles in his body. He focuses on a part of the blanket that he does see, and after a few minutes he is sure he would recognize it in the pile of blankets of the same brand and model anywhere in the world.

A machine beeps close to him with regularity. Monitoring, supervision. Why observe a person who can't go anywhere? Still, he doesn't like the idea at all. He isn't sure he's a person but he thinks that he should be. The next center of his focus is the floor. Clean. Clinically clean, smelling on disinfectants. An institution. A prison. A hospital. A medical ward of a prison. He never knows why prison is the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe because he knows he is being watched from a distance, and he doesn't see why the patients in any decent hospital should be watched without their knowledge and consent. _Why would following what I do be important to anyone?_ The beeping, on the other hand, it's some instrument more complex than a simple one measuring the heartbeat they would have in any better prison. It's something elaborate, the numbers and the other data on a small screen he cannot see very well probably register and evaluate more vital functions that he is aware are existing in a human body.

He wishes he could move at least a bit to extend his area of study. He can't. His focus goes up for the first time. The ceiling is oppressive. High, and by the looks of it, of a very solid construction. Secured. State of the art. He loses hope watching it. There is no easy way through it he can think of. So he looks down.

The leg of the bed he's lying on is made of metal and is ending on a wheel. A hospital bed. He doesn't feel ill, only unable to move. What is he doing in the hospital, then? He believes he could speak if he opened her mouth. Maybe he should have said something to those people above him. Something in the back of his mind tells him it's much safer he did not. _Why should I worry about my safety?_ he doesn't know either.

Another smell comes from the outside, and he realizes a window must be open in the room he is in. It has to be the warm time of the year for the surroundings to exhale that perfume. Late spring, maybe the beginning of summer. The idea of the month of April fills him with the sudden dread of dying. He doesn't want to die. So he chooses to believes it is summer reigning on the outside and that his life has just started. The distance to the window must not be too great. If he could walk, he could reach it and use it to get out. Out. That thought soon gains huge proportions in his head.

But what would he do then? Where would he go? The realization strikes him as he thinks of that. It's not only that he has no idea where he is. He has no idea who he is nor how he came to be there. A brief look at the visible parts of his body tells him that he's not old yet. He may yet be all right. He doesn't feel old in his head. And he knows, he knows, if only he keeps looking he will find the answers he needs. Then, he will have a plan. Planning is important. Details are important. And he is good in grasping the details. That much he knows.

First, he needs to move. Willing to move a finger gives no results. Only the opening of the eyes is possible. He tries to wiggle a toe on one of the feet, only to realizes he is missing that toe. He attempts with the other foot, and that works better, or at least all the toes are there. The quick mental tour of all the other parts of his body leaves him partially sure that he still has all the rest of the body parts except for the two toes. He would breathe out as a sign of a relief but no voice comes from his mouth, lips unmovable as the rest of him. Petrified. Stoned. _Maybe they gave me something?_ he thinks. _But why would they?_ He is sure of one thing, those two people wanted him awake. _How long have I… slept?_ He has no idea whatsoever.

So he opens and closes one of his eyelids at the time, and occasionally believes that he managed to wiggle a big toe. But the sensation of the movement could very well be only in his head.

xxxxxx

**The house of congressman Kellerman, presidential candidate for the second time, late that night.**

A well placed call to Lincoln, trustful as ever, reveals what Paul already knows. Sara is gone for a job offer somewhere in the countryside. _Helena, Montana._ Paul says how happy he is about it, to Lincoln, and how thrilled he is for Sara, to finally be able move on. When Lincoln hangs up, Paul has no other choice but to place another phone call that same day to a person he never expected to speak to again.

"Kelly," he hisses at her over the phone, and he doesn't even know why she is answering him again. That's nothing like Kelly he remembers from before he started to work for Caroline Reynolds. His former business associate has always been trickier than the weather. Kelly can change her number faster than most people can change their pants. Then again he never bothered to check on her after their fallout. Until his papers were delivered that day and he saw a new game being played out. He nevertheless tells her what he called her for, and that means being much more honest that he usually is. Almost as honest as Lincoln by his standards. "This time I'm coming after you, and I'm getting _her_ the hell out of there. Whatever it is that you're doing, just find someone else."

" _I wouldn't do that, Paul, really,"_ he hears her casual reply over the phone, and there is that sound of a tea spoon stirring the excessive sugar in a hollow-sounding mug _. So she still has her tea very sweet,_ he remembers with certain melancholy.

"Why not?" he inquires, knowing or expecting the answer he gets.

" _Oh, Paul, darling,"_ she says the way she knows it irks him to no end, " _you know that I'm more than able to take you out by myself if I have to. You wouldn't want to ruin your rampant progress on a society ladder, would you? Imagine your brains spilled all over one of your latest expensive suits. Wouldn't that be a peculiar sight?"_

"I'd be so happy to meet again too," he tells her and he means it. Even if he knows that she is right. If he wants to help Sara, he'd have to use exactly that part of his living brains which he purposefully put to partial hibernation since his new career started progressing so well. The times of cowboys are over, even if there are still native Americans living close to the place where Kelly has set her bloody clinic, and God knows what other lucrative criminal activity on the side.

Paul truly wants to help Sara because she's still alive, unlike his former partner and many other people he had put in the ground for the good of the country. So he needs to think of something with better chance to work out, something other than storming to Sara's rescue and getting killed in the process. Kelly Davis would enjoy that, he has no doubt. She might organize him a luxurious funeral afterwards, bring him flowers, and cry on his grave, but that's another matter. He throws the newspaper to the basket, rolled in a ball, and makes himself a cup of tea, a habit he lost for late at night, since... It's best not to dwell on it. For a second he remembers Kelly the way she was before she became a well paid assassin. Bright. Quick. Way too fast for her own good. He doesn't want to imagine the rest of her CV after she became a murderer, but he has no doubt that it's equally impressive.

In all the wrong ways.


	2. Gathering

**Fox River Pentientiary, May 2010**

Theodore Bagwell nervously turned the leaflet upside down before the interview. _Maybe this was not a such a good idea,_ he was suddenly obsessed by some second thoughts. Then again, anything was better than food in new improved Fox River Penitentiary under new incorrupt management from which you could not buy a single favour or blackmail them into making your time more pleasant. Not even fresh _fish_ tasted as juicy as before.

The woman who would interview him was _black,_ and stunningly ugly, in her late forties, with a butt of an ox. _A creep,_ he thought, _they want a creep. They collect maniacs because they believe they can help them out. A prisoner with serious psychological, preferably even psychiatric problems and diagnosis,_ the glossy paper demanded.

 _I will give them one,_ he decided. _Dad would be proud._ Before the woman could ask her first question, good old Bagwell was all over her, half biting her neck, half choking her with her own bra he managed to pluck out. It felt _invigorating._ She didn't taste that bad, he had to admit. He only regretted he didn't have time to have his way with her and kill her before the guards subdued him violently as was their job. And the new ones were rather good at doing precisely that. _This would have confirmed the diagnosis,_ T-Bag thought with satisfaction. He wondered what the new prison would be like and concluded once again that it couldn't be worse than the one he'd been already rotting in for the rest of his life. _Thanks to Michael. Cute, cruel Michael._

 _Dead Michael,_ T-Bag thought with even bigger satisfaction. He may have been a creep and all that, but he was still alive and kicking. When it concerned him, he intended to keep things exactly that way.

 _Montana,_ he thought with sheer enthusiasm, _here I come._

The happiness over leaving Fox River and going somewhere else made him as excited as when he drove all over the country with a bag of stolen dollars in the back seat of an equally stolen car. He wondered if anyone had ever found the bag with money in South America again. Or if it became food for fish, the real ones, cold and more creepy than good old T-Bag could ever aspire to be.

The leaflet T-Bag found in the garbage can where the warden's cleaning lady must have dropped it, lay abandoned on the floor of the interview room, reading for no one in particular:

" _The ward for incurable patients in the clinic of St Agatha, Montana. Prisoners from state penitentiaries convicted to a life in prison are allowed to transfer in case of serious psychological and/or preferably psychiatric troubles. You are a director of a state prison and a prisoner is causing you trouble? Let us help you. Our team of experts directs problematic individuals to community work in comfortable natural surroundings, providing maximum security at the same time. A human approach to the unhappy bottom of our society..."_

The bottom of the society that went by the name of Theodore Bagwell too to whistling cheerfully almost all the way to Montana. He would have tossed his hat in the air if the guards had allowed him to wear one.

xxxxx

**St Agatha clinic, Montana**

"Ms Davis," Sara nods politely, taking an offered seat in a white square office in the heart of the newly built clinic, situated deep in one of the largest, most virgin looking dark forest of pine and fir she had ever seen. The facilities are built on a large clearing, probably deforested for that purpose, but the trees are everywhere around them, standing straight next to the road winding up Sara had to drive on to reach her new working place. She has to look at the glass door of the Chief Executive office with the particular painful longing no one else could understand. It appears to be exactly the same, same built, same model, as the door of her own office in Fox River that she had left open for Michael, years ago, just before going to kill herself over it. _It may have been better if I succeeded,_ she thinks and hates herself for thinking it because she know it's a lie and she's only being a coward unable to continue as Michael would have wanted.

"Mrs Scofield," the short black haired woman interrupts her line of depressive thinking matter of factly, her cold blue eyes studying Sara's references and motivation letter with precision. "I am glad that you could make it here so soon. I have to admit to you, it hasn't been easy to find competent staff motivated to move out of the civilisation if only for a year to start with."

"Civilisation has not been one of my top priorities in the last five years," Sara says sincerely and smiles at her new boss.

"If you need help to settle..."

"No, thank you" Sara refuses smoothly, "you will find that I am not very demanding. I will find something soon."

"Great," the short haired woman who could be seven or eight years her senior approves and offers Sara a hand.

Sara shakes it and as she does so she notices the unnatural coldness of the other woman's skin, in sharp contrast with her welcoming posture. Almost as if she had artificial skin or gloves, something totally science fiction like.

It's impossible, but Sara still has second thoughts: "Maybe we could do a probation of half a year."

"I'm so sorry," Ms Davis declines, "it's a year to start with or I will have to look for someone else."

The sun is shining, and Sara thinks she should not fear this woman. The clinic is brand new and clean from what she can see, the patients rich and harmless. Mikey liked the city where they will live and she really, really doesn't want to go back. There is nothing for her where she came from.

"All right," she says, "I guess... I guess I haven't been working for a while so it's hard to assume a new obligation just like this, out of the blue."

"I know the feeling," Ms Davis says. "Welcome to St. Agatha, Sara. I am sure that we will be good friends."

"Kelly," she crosses the treatment barrier carefully, treading on uneasy ground. Her boss' smile widens and when they shake hands again Kelly's skin seems more normal.

Sara is not sure about anything at all but she still agrees to it, or doesn't object to it, and then she hurries to the outside to find Mikey. She finds her sun playing with a worm on a green meadow next to the wall of the precinct under the watchful eye of a friendly looking sturdy guard.

"He's a good boy, Madam," the man tells her, "wouldn't hurt a worm, just studies it for what it does."

"He is," Sara has to agree. _He's the best boy._ "What's behind this wall?" she asks.

"Oh, nothing much," the guard says scratching his head. "They are building a new ward for incurable psychiatric patients with sufficient funds, but it's not in use yet."

"I see," Sara says and wonders if she would work with those people as well. Somehow it's not what she wanted. And soon she drives away with Mikey, down the road she came form, carrying the picture of the wall in her mind, an archaic structure of stone masonry, built to resemble a castle rather than a medical installation. She assumes the rich can and will pay for the state of the art care which looks antique to the uncultivated eye. It is the last night she spends in the motel and she dreams about the wall, thinking that somehow it is important. Next morning she rents a house, and Mikey is all thrilled about it. It has a garden, and it rained at night, and there are not only worms, but also snails, large and friendly. If you put them on your hand, they crawl out of their houses, antennae and soft body moving forward, unafraid.

It's a good place and Sara is glad when Mikey smiles.

She buys a new phone, it's a smart one, a recent product on the market, and calls Lincoln. It has been three days since she got in touch with anyone, and three days since she ditched her old phone.

"Hi, Linc," she says, "Mikey dropped my phone in water," she invents the first thing that comes into mind. "I just bought a new one. I was busy with the moving and all to do it sooner"

"Yes, I found a house," she confirms.

"Yes, I start in a week," she laughs a tiny bit to reassure him that everything is fine. Even if it will never be.

"Sure, you will visit. When we settle a bit, OK?"

In the end she asks him not to give her number to _anyone, anyone at all._ And she believes him that he'll not do it.

Because Michael is dead but they are still family.

Xxxxxx

The doctor who comes to see him has short black hair. _Wiry._ Her nails are artificial, he notices immediately, her look too scientific for his liking. There is a pair of glasses in her white coat which she chooses not to wear. _She doesn't need them,_ he understands, _but she lets others believe she does._

"Hello, Michael," she says. "My name is Kelly."

"Hello, Kelly," he replies and wonders if Michael is his name. It doesn't sound too bad so he accepts it for the time being. He doesn't like the name Kelly. He thinks it could belong to something called the Company but part of his mind tells him that the Company is dead, and the more conscious part of his awareness, more rational and less intuitive, informs him that he has no idea what the Company is or if such entity exists at all.

"Do you remember anything?" Kelly asks him.

"About what?" he asks back. He doesn't remember a single thing before waking up in a hospital bed and seeing this woman and a fussy grey haired man above him, but he would rather not admit that. It's somehow embarrassing to say the least. He is not a newborn baby, he isn't. Yet he knows there is so much escaping him that he could almost be an infant. If only he would stop noticing things, the slightly torn border on the white coats' right pocket. The tiny stain of ink somewhere on the floor. It's tiresome and serves no obvious purpose.

"About anything," she insists and her smile is triumphant.

 _She knows,_ he understands, so there is no point in hiding.

"Why do I feel that you will tell me about things that I do not remember?" he asks again.

"You have been very ill," she informs him, with only the little bits and pieces she deems he should know. "You've done some pretty terrible things before you were confined to our care. And than you had a terrible accident in which you nearly died. I operated you from a head injury after the explosion which very nearly killed you. You lived hooked on life support machines for five years."

"Was there a tumor in my head when you cut it open?" he asks, not knowing why, not even knowing that the operation she _says_ she had done involved the cranial area. _It must have,_ he believes, against his better judgement.

"No, Michael," she says, "there wasn't. You were lucky that your brain remained more or less intact. But we cannot say the same about your memories, can we?"

"The terrible things I have done before," he is obliged to inquire because _she_ expects it of him, "what were they?"

"All in due time," she says, victorious, pleased about witholding things from him. _Powerful._ "Enough talking for today. We wouldn't want to jeopardize your recovery, would we?"

"I guess we wouldn't," he says and that's the only thin they sincerely agree about. He has to get better to discover who he is and what the hell has happened to him no matter what this woman, _Kelly,_ is trying to say.

His name is Michael and he is content about it when he manages to sit upright on his bed and put his feet on the floor. The slippers he wears are ugly and can only be produced for a hospital. From the new position he conquered after hours of useless trying, he can see through the open window. It is high up. The wall behind it in the open, over a courtyard, seems very smooth. There is no safe way to get out through the window without falling badly. He asks himself why he is studying ways to run away in everything he sees and he is hopelessly unable to answer that question.

He is on the top floor of a building towering over green forest surroundings behind the perimeter of a tall thick wall, layered with expensive white stone slabs to look ancient and built out of old fashioned masonry blocks, but he knows that this is only a ruse for concrete and other modern materials. Over the wall, there is a green meadow where a child is playing. It's a boy but he cannot see his face. The boy is too far. Soon there is a red haired woman with the child. She's wearing a yellow top and blue jeans in which she looks absolutely stunning. _She would be beautiful in anything,_ he thinks. The image is pleasing beyond anything he has seen since he woke up. He wiggles his toes in excitement and wonders who she is and if he will ever see her from close by.

The rest of the day passes in trying to make his body to work again, and unwillingly learning every stripe and crevice on the walls of his room, sterile and empty, apart from his bed, of which he now knows every screw and metal bar, and odd instruments that still surround it. He knows how all the instruments look in great detail but he has no idea what most of them _do._ And that scares him a great deal.

He wishes at least Kelly would come to see him but no one does. Food is brought in regularly, every time by a different serving man, who puts it on his bed table, waits for him to finish and takes it away.

At night he dreams of flames, and of driving away from them. But no matter how fast he pushes the car, the fire is always on his heels.

xxxxxxxx

**Somewhere in Panama**

"Paul," Lincoln acknowledges his unexpected guest wondering what made the famous congressman fly all the way to Panama.

"Lincoln," the politician in question says without further ado, occupying one of the kitchen chairs no one offered him, "we have to find Sara."

"Sara is OK," Lincoln insists, "she called me the other day. Her new job seems to be interesting."

"Listen to me," Kellerman says with a voice of an elite paid killer Lincoln hasn't heard from him for a while. He certainly doesn't use it for TV and other media appearances. "I have reasons to believe that her employer is an old _associate_ of mine.

"What, Paul," Lincoln enjoys annoying the man considering _he_ is already thoroughly bothered in the middle of his own kitchen in the middle of the night. "Have you turned paranoid in the old age?"

"Some say that paranoid keeps you alive," Kellerman comments putting a job add press clipping on Linc's kitchen table.

"The clinic of St Agatha in Montana," he says lazily as if that could mean something to Lincoln. "The address and the phone number is not listed in any phone book of our goddamn country. The commercials for rich patients who go there mention nothing about who is running it or its tax number."

"So what," Lincoln still does not want to believe that there could be anything wrong. Sara deserves to be happy after everything that has happened to them, if happiness is still possible for her without Michael. It has to be possible because that was what his brother would have wished for, so Lincoln lives, and lives well, to honor his last wish.

As a final proof, Kellerman spreads a map of Montana on the table. "Look," he says, "this is the estimated location of the clinic, from my less savoury sources." Lincoln doesn't have to ask what these sources are. The agents who serve the country without much regard for its laws, and Kellerman was one of them, not so long ago. Men who would kill you if you make a wrong move. Or even if you don't. Or out of pleasure. It was sometimes hard to tell what the reasons were. Or if there were any.

Lincoln can only stare at the map. The clinic is north of Helena, Montana, maybe an hour away at normal driving speed. But there is another place not too far away from the clinic either, further up north, maybe another two hours of driving, maybe less, a place he had visited with his brother when he was a death row convict on the run from justice. A place where a woman he loved in the past died, not deserving of her fate.

_Blackfoot, Montana._

"Let me make a few phone calls," Lincoln says and chases Sofia who tries to walk in on them at that moment back out to their living room.

It's almost 1 o'clock in the morning, but people don't go to bed early in Mexico, or in Panama, or in any place he likes well, so he calls Sucre first.

"What do you want, _papi?"_ their friend picks up the phone, slightly annoyed.

"There has been a development," Linc says, "Sara may be in trouble."

"What, where?" the singing voice goes all nervous over the phone.

"Let's meet in two days," Linc says. "In Helena, Montana."

Kellerman smiles with satisfaction when Mahone is the next one who answers the phone.

They will all meet. Like in the good old times. _Well, good is a matter of perception,_ Lincoln remembers.

"Can your career stand such long absence?" Linc ask his guest, having trouble to locate coffee in his own kitchen. He can't make good coffee but he should best try, decided that no one would get any sleep that night.

"I called in sick," Paul yawns and makes a crooked smile,

waving to Sofia to come in when she shows up again. He took a private flight to arrive to Panama that evening after a week of getting upset about Kelly's plans and digging everything he could about her clinic. Amounting to nothing much. And not a single mildly incriminating thing. Which makes him even more worried about her intentions.

No one will sleep.

"And this associate of yours? How is he?" Linc asks as the smell of coffee _finally_ fills up the kitchen making it more homely.

"She," Paul says quietly, "it's a she."

As if that should explain everything.

"Are you sure that she will _harm_ Sara?"

"I am not sure of anything. Except that she is dangerous, unpredictable and capable of being more brutal than I ever was."

Coming from a man who nearly drowned Sara in a sink of a hotel room, it is a lot to take.

"I see," Lincoln says, deciding to take one piece of information at the time. "And she was your... boss? Colleague agent? Whatever you call yourselves?"

"Worse," Paul shakes his head.

 _How much worse can it get?_ Linc thinks but for once, he keeps it to himself. If Kellerman is telling the truth, they will need his help to get to the bottom of the matter. And Michael is no longer with them to have a plan.

"She was his girlfriend," Sofia says in her warm southern accent Lincoln had grown to love more than anything. _Well, almost anything._ He would still give anything at all to hear Michael's voice again and know that, by some miracle, their family is whole again. "How can you tell?" he asks his girlfriend and even in asking he knows that she is right as usual. Sofia has a third, or a fourth eye when it comes to people, their less canny feelings included.

"She was," Paul admits. "It didn't end very well."

"How did it end?" the question pops out and Lincoln regrets it immediately because the answer makes him even more worried about Sara than humanly possible.

"She put a bullet in my head," Paul says. "I survived."

 _Unfortunately,_ Lincoln thinks, involuntarily, pouring coffee to his unwanted guest in the middle of the night.

"Can you give us a ride?" he asks Paul.

"My plane has left," Kellerman says without further explanation, "we'll take a regular one in the morning."

Sofia already switched the laptop on and is browsing the last minute flight offers.

"Here," she says when she finds it.

They drink their coffee.

And no one sleeps.


	3. The Gardener

**A cheap hotel, somewhere in Helena, Montana**

It's 30 degrees in shade and the air-conditioning is not working properly. Too bad for the others. Sucre doesn't like it too much either, but the warm weather makes him feel almost like home.

"That's crazy," Kellerman tells him, and Lincoln seems to agree. But Sucre doesn't _._ He strongly disagrees. They don't know. They have no idea. What it means when some evil people threaten _again_ the girl of your best friend who died, and who helped you write love letters from prison to your own girl. _Passion,_ he remembers the word still today.

Today, when Maricruz is his wife and she loves him, with _passion,_ and everything that is left of Michael is a classy tomb stone, his widow, and his son.

"No, it's not," he says, "if this stupid hospital wants a gardener, they will get a good one. I like plants! I'm good with them. Besides, your ex," he shoots at Kellerman, "she can always refuse me on an interview."

"If Kelly has Sara on purpose, and I have no doubt that she does," Kellerman explains slowly as if Sucre was an idiot only because he's Puerto Rican by origin, "she has done her homework and knows who you are. She will suspect something."

"Good for her," Sucre says decisively, "so first she gets all suspicious and a bit afraid, and then she knows."

"Knows what?" asks Lincoln who can be much more dense than Sucre himself despite never even visiting Puerto Rico.

"That Sara is not alone," he tells them both.

And Sucre believes that they finally may begin to understand.

xxxxxxxxx

**St. Agatha's ward for incurable patients**

It's the day he makes his first step, four days after he woke up and they had been _monitoring_ him all the time. He feels like a newborn, bare feet on the synthetic covered floor, clear in color, cleaned out to the point that the cleanliness is sickening, smooth and slippery, or it would be, when wet. He walks barefoot, this time purposefully ignoring the slippers that have been made ready for him under the metallic legs of the bed. Walking feels more real when the toes he still has can touch the floor.

Everything is prepared for him in this place and it is irritating.

His thin feet that have forgotten how to walk in the years that he was asleep take him real slow to the window. To the light. Always. He doesn't know why darkness frightens him so then, but he believes it always may have. Maybe someone had locked him up in a cellar as a child, or maybe that has happened to someone else, and he has just read about it, or watched it on TV, and was never able to forget it.

His effort is well rewarded, and the patient who was told his name was Michael, smiles.

Over the high wall, down below, he can see her again, and it is more than worth the dull ache in the unused muscles of his body. Blue jeans, black T-shirt, probably with three tiny buttons under her long neck, first two unbuttoned, he thinks. _Yellow would be better,_ he assesses _._ She is in a hurry to run away from him and get into the building. Then again, she has no idea he has been watching her, the day before, or right now, and he's way too far up to yell her to stop. She would never hear him. So he just hopes that if he sees her the next day she might wear the yellow top that reveals her shoulders. For some reason it would make him happy.

**Behind the glass, watching the patient No 113477**

The glass is bulletproof and clear, on their side, while the patient, standing at the window, can see what's behind him only as a concrete wall. If he would look, that is, because he's carelessly looking out, adjusting his blue-green eyes to the sunlight.

"He's doing better every day," the man says behind the glass, and Kelly makes a step backward.

"Like I told you," she replies, tired of explaining herself to men she is working with. Fed up with explaining anything to people in general. Now or before.

"Are you sure than he is up to the task?"

_My lucky day,_ she thinks. The questions just keep coming. There's nothing to stop them.

"Let's put it this way," she says and hopes it makes it somewhat clearer to her associate, "I believe he's one of the few people who's actually smarter than me. And it's a lot to say."

"You were not able to get me out of here, or out of the previous place where they had been holding me, for all your charade with the government," the man complains, nervously arranging and rearranging his thick greying hair behind his not so small ears.

"Quite right, " Kelly has to agree, "unless you want to provide the government with the access to the data they want. Then they will move you to the facility from which you can easily escape yourself. That deal still stands."

"No way," the man replies.

"Just as I thought," she answers automatically, turning her eyes to Michael again because she doesn't feel like looking at her colleague who can sometimes be so annoying. Yes, she is not imagining it, most unfortunately, the migraine is beginning to form in her right temple, merciless and never missing a moment. In Kelly's case migraine is the only certain thing in life next to dying.

To try and stop it, or to at least delay the onset of the pain, her mind begins to wonder if Paul is already in the city and which one of the surviving Fox River Nine will present himself for the interview for the position of the gardener. Lincoln? The Mexican guy? Or the former agent transformed into addict and rogue officer, the one who has changed sides more times than he knows. It would amuse her if Mahone would be her gardener. Because Kelly has also switched sides more frequently than she can count and the only things she care about it now is the fact that she is working for herself.

"You sure that bringing in all these people he knows will help our cause?"

Kelly almost quotes a medical textbook in her next reply: "In a case of partial or total loss of memory, bringing objects, or even more favourably, persons, that have been in close contact with the patient before the accident, can be beneficial to his regaining the knowledge of himself, and the normality of the behaviour."

"I'd never suspect you for wanting to help him," the man teases her.

"You know me too well, Ralph," she smirks back and sees him flinch at her use of his real name. Very few people would know _that._ She smiles innocently, waving away a short strand of sweaty black hair from her nose, and than she bites with her words, real hard, "it will also manipulate him into believing the conditions we want him to believe in. Unless you want to subscribe to the new treatment programme I will soon run in this institution. That would also present a way of escape. Albeit somewhat unconventional…"

The looking glass gets a bit murky on the edges and she makes a mental note to tell the cleaning staff to polish it. Perhaps she should publish an add to hire more of those, but she doesn't want to make what she wants too obvious to Paul. He isn't that stupid, after all. If a bit limited in Kelly's opinion. Even if the idea of him applying for the cleaning job is positively hilarious and pleasing to the extreme. Maybe the closed ward would need a plumber. _That_ idea is so outrageously funny that it almost helps against her mounting headache.

"I will leave that pleasure to your other patients, my dear," Ralph says and, luckily, just like it began, the conversation is over. He had had enough of her for the day and he retires willingly to his room, or cell, to call the things by their name.

Pain killers must be in her drawer, she hopes as she runs down the spiral stairs connecting the two wards, and as she applies proper cards, codes and procedures to the doors on both sides. She doesn't want her daughter to see her with migraine when she comes back home. It's not the crazy mommy she wants, or needs. It's a nice reasonable reassuring woman who has left her problems behind.

Kelly is very much determined to be that woman, if only for her daughter.

xxxxxxx

**A schoolyard somewhere in Helena, Montana**

She brings Mikey to school before going to work. It's only his second day but he immediately hugs a black girl who is a brought by a rather corpulent African lady in her early forties. The woman smiles at her daughter.

"I'm Sara," she tells the mother of her son's new friend, still amazed that he could open up so fast to someone who is not family. Then again, her son doesn't have to be like his parents in that regard, both of them rather introvert in their early childhood as far as she knows. _The children are like themselves,_ she knows it, but seeing it for real is troubling and an immense source of motherly relief at the same time. _He will not repeat my mistakes. I just have to help him not to make too many of his own._

"Esperança," the woman smiles in a simple friendly way introducing herself. "And this is Miss Maria Adelaide, but we call her Adelaide."

"Nice name," Sara says, "my son is called Michael, but we call him Mikey."

"I'd say that's a nice and a short name too!" Esperança comments and the innocent exchange cements Sara's irrational belief that she has done very well by coming to Montana. _Mikey will have friends, real friends, not only family,_ she gets completely elated and overjoyed at the thought.

Her son will have the life he deserves, she will make sure of that, a normal easy life where people love him. _Even if he doesn't have a father._

"Well, maybe I'll see you later," she tells Esperança before driving away, Mikey not making any problems in being left alone in a company of his new friend. "I make good pancakes," Esperança offers immediately, "you can come and try them some day."

"Why not?" Sara says but she knows it will take her a bit more time before she trusts the large woman and her daughter that much.

Sara's first day at work is as uninteresting as the weather is too beautiful to be true. There are two patients for routine check-up upon admittance to the clinic, both healthy as the fish. And while she's certainly not an expert, the only psychological trouble they seem to be suffering from is the dissatisfaction of the rich: of people who have seen all the world entirely too soon. So that when they are only a little bit older than Sara is now, there is nothing left to explore any more in their opinion. She doesn't like the attitude but she's able to understand it. She was able to feel it when she was younger and before she started using.

Food is not bad in St Agatha's she thinks after her lunch when she almost dozes on her desk, head falling down in front of the computer screen. _Like in the first months of pregnancy,_ she remembers. But she is not expecting now, and she probably never will.

Being idle, she remembers hurrying to arrive on time that morning, it's never easy with school, she should have known that. She unbuttoned her T-shirt before getting out of the car, and as she rushed forward on the cobble-stoned covered path between the parking lot and the main entrance. She knows it's her imagination, but it felt as if someone had been watching her from afar.

It's not a frightening feeling, and in the stupor of the digestion she fantasises how that someone would have looked a bit like Michael, and her thoughts drift further to the blue-green gaze observing her keenly through the fence of Fox River, long ago, as she turns back and smiles…

Sun is a tricky thing and Sara falls asleep.

When she's awake, her silly thoughts are forgotten. She has another appointment to do her job, and than she can go home to her son, and hope that the dinner she intends to make will not get burned.

xxxxxxxx

**Kelly's Office, St. Agatha**

"A former inmate?" the Chief Executive Officer of St Agatha clinic comments on Fernando Sucre's CV as if she was asking for the color of his eyes or his middle name.

"Yes," Sucre confirms because there's no use in denying it. They've been all over the newspapers and on the TV when it all happened. The Fox River 9. "Freed of all charges."

"I see," the black haired woman gives him an uneasy look. "In case that the Board of Governors which I still have to consult on this particular contract accepts that I can hire you, how soon could you start?"

"Well, now?" he says wondering why she doesn't have the autonomy of decision in employing people as she well should. Her next words provoke an uncanny feeling in Sucre that Ms Kelly Davis can read minds. _This is not a good thing,_ he concludes and makes a sign of the cross, just in case.

"You are right in wondering why I cannot make this decision myself. I will be coming right to that," she clarifies, taking in his gesture with an amusement of a non believer. "You see, Mr Sucre, there is a particular condition linked to the position of a gardener which we have not been able to disclose in the add due to some confidentiality matters. Should you accept the position, you would be required to sign a confidentiality and a non-disclosure statement."

"Excuse me, Madam," Fernando asks, "but what secret can there be with maintaining a garden?"

"It's not about what you will do, it's where you will do it," she explains further.

"I am listening," he says, recalling Kellerman's description of the woman, and with every passing moment he's feeling less and less comfortable in her presence. He had had contacts with Gretchen Morgan in his previous life, but this _Kelly_ _Davies_ looks incredibly more dangerous. And smart. He reminds him of someone but Sucre is unable to pinpoint who it was. _Maybe I will remember later,_ he dismisses the idea, even if it makes him curious.

"This clinic has another ward, Mr Sucre, one whose existence we are not advertising in the newspapers. It's called the ward for incurable patients. What is more, only people who hold a clearance to work in it know of its existence. Two-thirds of the garden that you should take care of are situated in that part of the clinic, closed to the general public."

"Incurable, how?" he asks. He will do this for Sara, but he would rather not listen to the terminal patients dying throes if he doesn't have to. It brings bad luck.

"Mainly crazy," she informs him, "and a few other conditions of chronic diseases that you have probably never heard about."

"Would I have any contact with this crazy or ill people?" _Would Sara?_ he thinks but he cannot finish his question. It's one thing to let this Kelly be suspicious, but another to confirm her doubts.

"Not at all, your business would be primarily with the garden. The non-disclosure statement would be about not revealing to anyone that this part of the clinic exists and to mind your own business. Written in roughly 5000 words of legal language, but the essence is that…" she finishes cynically.

_Why do they all think of me as stupid? Well, I am a bit, but not as they think,_ Sucre gets angry but he keeps his pride down. Being underestimated can be an advantage when you deal with real criminals and murderers pretending to be good looking doctors, and that is who this Kelly Davis might be. Even if he cannot really blame her for putting a bullet in Kellerman's head. Fernando would never pull a trigger on a gun, but he can see the appeal of shooting that man. Jesus knows that he must have deserved it for everything he has done in life.

"I could agree to that," he grins and she smiles back.

The pen is at hand, and just like that, it's done.

It's not only Sara, it's Fernando Sucre who has a brand new job as well.

xxxxxxxxxxx

**St. Agatha's ward for incurable patients**

The straw hat is large and almost friendly. In any case it doesn't repulse him as it should. There is some kind of transparent white tissue hanging from it on all sides. It looks like a net that could have been used in the old times to collect honey from the bees if he is not very much wrong. The thin veil would hide his face but it could even be comfortable to wear in a too warm weather outside. He also gets a grey T-Shirt and simple black trousers, laid out ready next to his back.

"Thank you," he says to the caretaker who brought them, hoping it means they would let him out, but the man doesn't reply. _Are they forbidden to talk to me?_ he thinks. It appears so. Maybe it's part of a strategy to make him go well and truly crazy and do some more terrible things, _for them, in their service._ If it is true what the doctor has said that he had done terrible things before.

Soon, Kelly, he remembers the name of the female doctor, comes to see him.

"Your condition is still delicate," she informs him. "After your cerebral injury, you should not expose your head to the sun, at all. Do you understand?"

He nods despite that he doesn't. Understand, that is. There is so much he doesn't understand but one day he will. He just has to have a little faith. _Have a little faith?_ Who has said that? The words hurt as if a surgical knife had cut his head open right at that moment without any anaesthetic to make it any more bearable.

"Have a little faith," he parrots, and the doctor narrows her eyes.

"What did you just say?" she asks. "Who told you that?"

"Huh, nothing, I mean, no one," he denies everything. "It must be this head injury thing, I guess, phrases just pop up in my mind and some of them want out. This is all a bit overwhelming, doc. Being asleep, waking up, and all that."

"I understand," she says, but she still doesn't believe him. If she has ever believed him to start with. _It doesn't matter,_ he thinks. He doesn't need anyone to believe in him. Least of all Kelly.

"Does this mean," he starts pointing at the hat to change the topic, "does this mean I can go out?"

"Tomorrow," she agrees, her not so ugly face sour about something, hand rushing to one of her temples. "You will find that our garden is quite beautiful. You just have to have a little patience."

With that, Kelly leaves. His fingers itch for a piece of paper. He knows he would fold it in a shape of a bird, but he doesn't know how he knows that. It's maddening. Then maybe, when he goes out tomorrow, he could leave the bird somewhere on the path of the beautiful woman he is seeing. Maybe she would like it, too.

There are plenty of useless things in his room, and he knows them all by heart, but there is no paper.

He can't go out just yet so he involuntarily scans his room again, as if he didn't know every corner of it twice all over already. His methodical insight focuses on the smallest something on the wall behind his bed, behind his back when he's looking through the window. _It's a wall, right?_ he asks himself all of a sudden. _And what if it isn't?_

An uncontrolled impulse to check it is very strong. So he positions himself in front of the window, letting the sun shine on him, and cast a much larger shadow than the size of his body on that back wall, in the afternoon when the shadows grow longer, and the heat more oppressive despite the functioning air conditioning in his perfectly sterile room. He stays like that for ages, and he knows, he knows only too well that he is being watched. Monitored. This doesn't fill him with fear, but with the desire to be smarter than the people watching. He believes that he can be, head injury of not.

He turns sideways to the sun, and his shadow shifts on the floor of the room and the back wall. When it does, the colour of the wall changes on one place. It doesn't last very long, it's only a fleeting moment, but it is _there_.

The wall is not the wall. It's more likely a window, or a looking glass. Camouflaged but real. He has read of those constructions, very specialised, and for very specialised state institutions. Very few private companies would be able to afford them although he guesses some rich corporations could.

_But probably not any smaller company, or individual hospital, which would be into honest business_ , he thinks. Again, he doesn't know how he knows it, but he knows he is right.

And his latest revelation does give him creeps. _What is this place?_ he thinks, helpless. _Never mind,_ he tells himself. _I am here now, and I will find out._

Methodically, he applies his peculiar gift of observation to willingly record information about every single thing in a room, understanding that the unwanted clarity and too detailed perception that _is naturally his_ even when he doesn't want to have it, could also become his tool.

His only weapon.

If what he starts to believe is true and _no one_ in this place is his friend.

Then again, he doesn't know who he is and it well may be that outside that place he has no friends either. _Five years,_ he thinks, _that is how long I slept._ Why hasn't anyone come looking for him? Or maybe they did, but they didn't know where he was.

He tries the hat on and it fits perfectly. He will proceed one step at the time. The grey T-shirt does too and it looks like something he had worn before.

It is pointless to worry. He will try and take everything one step at the time.


	4. New Friends, Old Friends

**Supermarket in Helena, Montana**

Kelly had taken too many things from the shiny shelves of a small local supermarket, and the paper bag was going to be way too heavy for her to carry to the car. Short of statures, she always suffered the consequences. There were no people queuing to pay, only a skinny employee who didn't look as having reached legal age to work. Her headache hasn't turned any better since the night before.

 _Some surgeon that I am,_ she thought, _unable to fix my own migraines._ There were worse things than migraines but she didn't want to dwell on that. If she hurried, she had to hurry, she could then still see her beautiful adopted daughter before Esperança would drive her to the local school. Last night she told her about the little friend she had made already, all enthusiastic, a blond boy with blue eyes. _At least someone is happy about living in the middle of nowhere,_ Kelly considered, eager to go somewhere else, as usual. Although she knew quite well that for her, there was no good place to be.

When people met Esperança, no one suspected she could drive, or speak English properly. They suspected even less that she could have interviewed a psychopath prisoner in Fox River and secure his transfer to St Agatha's for further observation in an extremely smart way. Kelly laughed at how good everything was going. Michael was going to meet Ralph soon, and if she was lucky, she could still go on vacation she planned in Africa in September. Adelaide might like to see for a while the country where she was born.

Lost in thoughts and with a smile on her lips, she ventured out to the empty parking lot, hitting a solid something. She imagined all her stuff on the floor, but the thing, or rather, the person, she could not tell, due to the bright morning sun and galloping headache, secured the paper bag, way kinder to her groceries than he has ever been to her.

"Kelly," a voice says, accomplished.

 _Oh no,_ Kelly Davis thought, _not this early for God's sake..._

"It's so nice to see you again," he said in a false concerned tone he would use before torturing people. Kelly was not the one to tease. Her left foot was in his crotch and soon she was sprinting down the parking lot and out of his way. She only managed to get her food in the backpack of her car before he caught up with her, again.

 _Not as fast as I used to be, am I?_ she was angry with herself, turning her head backwards and all the way up to face Paul Kellerman. She would always forget how much taller he was. Or how short she was in general. _Poison is sold in small bottles,_ she remembered and she liked herself again.

"And I was so hoping to see you apply for a position of my gardener," she said, seeing that her tactics of running away failed miserably.

"Why?" he was puzzled. A bit. _Excellent,_ she thought.

Unceremoniously, she pulled his pants down, and tried another approach out of her situation glad for the empty parking lot. Where no one would be watching her giving a blow job to her ex. The shop window was too far away for anyone to see them from there, between the car and some sort of fence. It looked like a great place to park when she came, close to the exit to the road. Doing _that_ would have always worked with Paul in the early days of their acquaintance. Soon she was down on the back seat just like she wanted, _both_ Paul's hands busy peeling off her jeans. Her body zoomed in a completely different tune than her conscious mind, because it was _Paul,_ and for a second she regretted it. Regretted a lost opportunity to actually let herself go.

But it was only for a second. She didn't have more time than that.

Faster than a snake, she pulled the gun hidden under the passenger seat and pressed it on his temple, ready to use.

"I _will_ do it again," she said, very focused, wondering how she must have looked. _As a murderous bitch,_ she thought. _Precisely what I am._

"I know, baby, I know," he said, his dark eyes unusually open and not sheltering any deceit. Which was perhaps the worst deceit of all.

"Get away from me," she said. It wasn't an idle threat.

Her aim remained certain as he walked away. She'd not start driving until he was far enough gone.

He had the cheek to call out to her, over the entire parking lot, like a boy of 18: "I could come to your fancy office, you know, how about Friday evening? I'm sure you have... _safeguards_ there against intruders like me. You could cook!"

"Deal," she said, not believing her own words.

She was miraculously home on time to see Adelaide to school.

And her head had stopped from hurting.

Xxxxxxxxx

**Garden of the closed ward in St Agatha**

One of the attendants let him out in a small square yard, twenty by twenty feet, if. Green grass covered the small plot of land , and next to the wall there was a garden patch with two roses, growing. They were not very high and they have not yet flowered in the season despite all the sun and warm weather.

Another man squatted in one of the corners, on the ground, as far away from the flowers as possible. Michael wore the large straw hate covering his face, where the other one was bare faced, wrinkled, once black shaggy hair greying visibly. Clever grey eyes glowed above a sharp hooked nose and the lips were curved up.

The man seemed to be enjoying the sun.

"Hello, son," he told him, "I'm Roger. And who would you be?"

"Michael," he answered, still unsure if that was his name. He guessed it was as good as any other.

"In for what? Robbery where they can't found the millions you stole? Murder? A serial kill?"

"I was ill," Michael said, "a woman told me I had done terrible things but I don't seem to remember them. What are you in for?"

Michael decided that asking the same thing back may give him some answers as to what the calm looking man was talking about.

"Oh, I'm innocent," the man who called himself Roger said, "but that's what everyone always says in here, and most of them aren't. Your response was at least a bit original, son."

"I'm not sure if the world original applies," Michael said smiling dryly under the net covering his face.

The bell chimed on the inside. A different attendant, more muscular and dangerous looking appeared from the inside and walked to Roger. "Time is up, old man," he told him.

"Wait a second," Roger commanded, waving Michael to approach. "Come, son."

Michael went as he was asked, curious. It was the first person who actually talked to him after the woman, Kelly. The attendant immediately obliged Roger to follow, using a _straight jacket_ , Michael observed, when he occupied the old man's place next to the wall. In the grey smooth surface constructed to appear old, there was a small damage at the level with a waist of a grown up person. When Roger squatted next to it, it must have been in his eyesight. Some kind of electrical wiring must have also been running through the state of the art reinforced concrete, a feature Michael did not notice in the walls of his room. _The external wall,_ he thought, eager to cross it. _But where to go?_ he thought, _there is nowhere I can go._

Roger was meanwhile ushered deeply inside the building. A muted but a distinguished grunt came from there. Followed by Roger's scream, even deeper on the inside. Michael shivered. _What have they done to him?_ So far the attendants have been kind to Michael. _I should have helped him,_ a compulsive need was getting a shape in Michael's almost empty mind. _Emptied,_ he thought with hatred. _That's what they have all done to me. They emptied my mind_

His discontent didn't last long. More curious about the little fissure, that should not have been there, than about the destiny of his new _friend,_ Michael squatted to, pressing a single blue-green eye at the correct spot. The opening widened after its beginning. Gaining a few inches in diameter it ran through the entire width of the wall, which was not that thick, or not that thick at that place, four foot at the most, maybe less. It overlooked a pathway and a larger green meadow where the beautiful woman would pass when she came and went every day.

Michael felt like he was back to school again, hoping she would pass at any moment. _Have I ever gone to school?_ He wondered and he could not remember.

The only thing he could see was grass, green and growing.

"Hello" he said but the sound did not travel very far through the hole, contrary to the laws of physics. At the very edge of his vision there was a driveway and a cabin of the guard. He grabbed the hole with his hands and tried to blow the words through it as if he was playing an odd instrument.

"Hello," he said again, and a hoarse distorted sound may have come forth, all the way into the open.

It was as if his whisper had the power to call her, for there she was, in a hurry again, in _that_ yellow top he wanted to see. She halted in front of the wall where he was and looked around, uncertain.

"Hello," he rolled the word again, through his hands cupping his mouth and the hole, howling through the wall, and out into the world.

"Who's there?" she said and she was bewildered, he could tell, while she appeared calm.

Than Kelly was also there, ruining the moment, confident and black haired where the stunning woman was gentle, her soft hair falling down her back in auburn glowing waves.

"Most of our patients believe to hear the ghosts at this wall," Kelly said. "The builders said it's the positioning of this wall and the natural wind flow in this area, it hums and makes you imagine voices. I didn't take you to be superstitious on the interview."

"I'm not," the gentle voice replied, somewhat more confident. "It's just that... I don't know."

"I want you to see a special patient today," Kelly said. "He's very rich and extravagant. He'll be wearing a hat when you see him. You should just check him as the others, without looking at his face. It's for the best if you don't talk.

"Oh well, I guess weird demands come with the money. If the person is not unpleasant, I can live with strange personal demands," Sara said, unconcerned.

"I was hoping you'd say that, Sara," Kelly said, "I knew that we were going to be such good friends.

 _Sara,_ he admired the name as if it was once his treasured possession. The steps echoed behind him and he slumped in the grass before one of the many friendly attendants, who all appeared so similar to Michael, accompanied him to a different room, windowless, the path to it different than to his usual room. _They are trying to prevent me to compose a map of premises in my head,_ he realized, uncertain if he could have done such a thing... Or not. Different attendance, different corridor to go to his room, or any other place, every time he walked.

 _A patient with the hat,_ he realized why he was there. _Me._

xxxxxxxxx

And indeed, in short time that lasts like a lifetime, Sara walks in. She checks him out in a well-practised way, ignoring his mask, only giving a look or two to the grey T-shirt he wore.

"You are fine, mister," she says, "I don't suppose you will talk."

And he didn't. He didn't know what to tell her. _Hello, I'm Michael. I don't really know who I am or why I am here. I've been looking at you for two days and you are beautiful._

There are papers in the pocket of her white doctor coat. He points at them when she is observing him, as well.

"You want a piece of paper?" she says "I guess there's no harm in giving you one. I still have to take your blood pressure and than we're done."

He stretches his arm towards her and his heartbeat increases five-fold when she mechanically proceeds in her activity.

"Somewhat higher than it should be," she says. "Any particular reason for that?"

 _You,_ he thinks, but the words are not coming.

"I understand, no talking," she says, resigned, taking notes of her findings, neatly putting away the medical gear she brought in the bag. They are in the otherwise empty room with a metallic table and two wooden chairs that do not go very well with it. An oddity, of source.

He gestures towards the paper again.

"Ok," she said, giving him one, continuing to arrange her things, one finger twiddling with a long lock of hair, confidently. She is not nervous. She is simply at ease.

His fingers attack the paper while she is working, until a white paper bird has come to life in his hands. It is delicate and fragile, like Sara. _Trustworthy,_ he knows.

When she stands up to leave, he backs as well, cheeks hot, hands sweaty. He still can't walk very well so he limps to the door faster than he should, stumbling.

She is immediately on guard, searching for some phone or button she must have to call for help if the patients were misbehaving.

But when he stretches out his palm, and she has seen it, her eyes widen as he had never seen them before, in a mixture of surprise and hope, mingled with extreme reticence and fear.

She glances around checking if there are hidden cameras in the room before she writes a few words on another empty paper, as a doctor taking note of her findings.

But the papers speaks differently. _Behind the wall? Was it you?_ it says. The edge of his straw hat nods, his head too far under to be seen.

She accepts the bird and proceeds, indifferently, to the door, passing next to him as if he was an office plant. A desire to stop her by force washes over him but he would never have any of that.

 _Have I really done terrible things, as Roger said all people here did? Was I a serial killer?_ He didn't think so, but it was possible, his violent impulse a proof that he might have been something like that.

Ashamed, he recoils back to his chair, on wobbly legs.

"Take it easy," she tells him from the door, in a tone a professional doctor should use. "The key to recovery after the surgery as Dr Davis described is to take it slow. She will further advise you on your condition tomorrow."

The paper bird was nesting safely in her hands and the last thing he had seen of her was a lingering smile.

xxxxx

**Doctor's Office**

The origami bird was on her desk again and so were the memories she wanted to forget. She wanted to imagine the bird was different but she knew it was exactly the same as Michael would have made it. Maybe there was no other way to fold an origami crane. In her head, one more time of too many, the world exploded, she walked away and Michael died. The next thing to crush down was a silly hope.

 _It is impossible_ , she tells herself and she believes it instantly. Michael could not have been the only person in the world obsessed with origami. _Michael would have spoken to me if it had been him,_ she laughs bitterly at her short-liver illusion, fried on the flames of implacable logic. _He would know me._ Unless, unless he was afraid. Unless something was going on again. Something he wanted to protect her from. _Come on, Sara,_ she scorns herself. It would be too good to be true. So far, they have never lived a conspiracy that would bring them together instead of bringing them apart.

She examines the bird for flaws, for differences. There aren't any, she concludes again. Than she studies the garbage can, and the container to separate hazardous medical waste. Than the closet containing needles and other stuff she'd better not even consider. She stares at the garbage can again.

Her computer beeps, fortunately. A remainder, a daily one. In exactly 15 minutes she has to go to the parking lot and drive to school to pick up her son. There is no one who can do it for her. Routine takes over. Clean the desk, close the files, go to the toilet, get going. Above all, get going. Being a mother is a wonderful thing. It gives this whole lot of obligations preventing a grown up woman to go all crazy with her thoughts.

She hurries to reach the car, keys already in hand. But in the bottom of her mind she still knows it, even when she tries to convince herself that what she did was unconscious. The bird remains safely under her computer screen, and she purposefully put it over there, not throwing it away as she should have done. It would be there tomorrow as well. It is unfair. She cannot go on having fantasies about unknown men because they remind her of her deceased husband.

And in her dreams that night, Michael looks after her, like an angel of the underworld, all smart and sad, and unreal, so unreal, wearing a stupid straw hat. _Move on,_ he tells her. She can't. She is decided to throw away the bird the next day.

Keeping it would be a treason to his memory. One day she might be able to move on.

But it is not that day.

xxxxxxx

**Kelly's private office, top floor, St Agatha's, late at night**

"It may be a bit far fetched," Ralph says, sipping a very old whiskey, and Kelly reminds herself she should call him Roger. Her private office is the only place in St Agatha's where secrets can be spoken freely. _Some of them at least,_ she considered. She had swiped the room clean herself. No cameras, no listening devices, no electronic devices and no access to internet. Thick walls and a view of the forest through a very long horizontal window on one of the walls, closer to the ceiling than to the floor, in very odd proportions for standard architectonic planning.

"Wait to see Mr Morris," she tells him, pouring a glass of whiskey to herself, ignoring a fatherly disapproving look Roger ( _Ralph_ ) gives her. _You are no relative of mine,_ she tells him mentally, _merely an associate, and there is a difference._ Out loud, she continues:"Poor man," she sniffs, and Roger laugh heartily when she explains further: "He will give a marvellous performance not knowing to be a guinea pig. From that point on it is only a matter of time before Michael considers you to be unjustly condemned to death, or worse."

"I just don't look that much like Lincoln."

"You don't have to," Kelly says, downing a large portion of alcohol down her already burning throat, "I paid the best shrinks to do estimates on this: we only have to roughly simulate the situation for him to do exactly what he did in Fox River"

"Is that why his wife looks exactly like his wife?" Roger says cynically.

"He has no idea who she is," Kelly dismisses the argument, finishing her drink, "but I hope he'll have the same reaction to her as in Fox River. The shrinks say it would help the emotional truthfulness and give credibility to the simulated situation."

"Simulated? That's what you told the shrinks?" Roger is convinced now, and it makes Kelly happy because Ralph, her boss, can be so annoying when he's unhappy. _Extremely_ annoying.

"I couldn't very well tell them the truth, could I?" Kelly stretches on the sofa and she wishes to go home, drunk driving on not. On the second thought, better not. But she had not been dismissed, not yet.

"I should go back before the recording devices notice my absence," Roger says, "and hey, when you cook for you ex, shouldn't you do it in some tapped room rather than here? He was quite a competent killer, wasn't he?"

"He still is," Kelly smiles with appreciation, "and it's great to know that you're tapping my car, just in case I may once need your outside guns to help me for real."

"Just don't let him in here," he tells her before leaving and it's an order, and she hates herself for regretting a lost opportunity. _To do what? Get laid and possibly murdered? How perverted can you get, Kelly? Ralph is right about this, and about many other things._

It has been a long day and Kelly Davis can finally go home. Trying to ignore the passing of days. And the fact that her rusting cooking skills will soon be put to a test. _I might order sushi,_ she thinks of a food Paul loathes, and she knows that she won't order it. With everything they have been through, she finds that she doesn't hate him nowhere nearly enough. _Not yet,_ she tells herself, knowing he will not be nice to her either way. Esperança is still awake when she comes home, and Adelaide played with that nice boy again. There is a message from Morris on her answering machine. _Luckily, for everything, there is a plan_ , she concludes and the notion calms her down. When Kelly falls asleep, still not completely sober from her day and her late evening cups, she thinks how easy life is.

When there are no Fridays.


	5. The Anomaly

**Friday, 17.00pm, Kelly's Private Office, St. Agatha's Clinic**

"Is Mr Morris quite ready?" Kelly asks her secretary over the phone and she can almost see the woman smile, pleased to inform her positively.

"He'll be all yours in two days after the necessary check-up with Dr. Tancredi"

"I assume the paperwork has been done?" Kelly _has_ to check, even if she knows it was, they have been waiting for this for so long, and suddenly, it's there, and she's nervous. And it's also Friday. There are candles on top of her drawers, waiting to be put on table, and food will be delivered shortly, just before 8pm. There are freshly pluckes flowers too, white, orange and yellow, courtesy of Mr Sucre. She will not tell Paul but she made the arrangement herself.

"I personally checked that all forms are in order, Ms Davis... Hey! What do you THINK you are doing?"

"Susan?" Kelly asks but the connection is broken. Before she knows it. Paul is in her office, where she should not have let him enter according to Roger (Ralph, Ralph, Ralph, Roger is only a name) with the former addict, Mahone. Now, _that_ is something she didn't expect.

"And here I was about to start making a romantic dinner," she comments, all business about the new situation.

"Higher orders," Paul says even more business like than she can manage, "the agent here has all the necessary signatures to search your clinic, your office and all your licenses to perform your job. It's useless to check his credentials out, so save yourself some time."

"Please, come in," Kelly tells them both, amused, as if they haven't already barged in her holy of holies. In St. Agatha's at least. There are other places they don't know about. Places she considered showing to Paul before she shot him in his head and they parted ways. _At least I don't have to worry about getting all weak towards Paul and murdered as a next step,_ she thinks. _And it's a wonderful way to get rid of Friday, and of Paul. Has he truly changed his ways to bring a law enforcement agent with him? Former criminal or not?_ Kelly hopes this could be the case but she is not quite able to believe it. "May I pour you a drink while he is working?" she asks her ex and pours him a whiskey, straight, without waiting for an answer. She pours sparkling water to Mahone and gestures to her private medical cabinet. "Unless you would want a treat from my private supply. They come in pink or yellow coating, as you wish and the effect is quite similar to what you'd been using..." Mahone's face tells her everything she didn't dare to ask, as he drinks the water in one sip to hide his embarrassment, and she immediately serves him another one, in a motherly fashion despite that she is younger than both her guests. She is of the same age with Michael, she thinks. _It's irrelevant,_ she dismisses the entire range of thoughts.

"Maybe I should get all the necessary authorisations and do a thorough check up on both of you," she tells them as her office is devastated and the pillows on her expensive designer made bright red sofa cut open. "Jesus knows what I could find."

"It's even worse when you speak of Jeaus than when I do," Paul tells her, cold judgement in his eyes, and she has to turn her head away because he is probably right. Except that she refuses to believe in that. _We have to believe we are good to continue to exist, don't we,_ she thinks and tries to forget about Paul, about Mahone, about what Roger would say, and about Fridays. She thinks of her daughter and of Esperanca and how soon she will go home and have cereals for dinner, like a 13 years old. They will taste better, and safer, than either whiskey or sex.

Three glasses of whisky and several bottles of water later Kelly is desperate. Thai food is delivered and the two men eat it with plastic forks, while she's only looking at them with contempt. Candles are never lit. _Not Korean food, luckily_ she thinks, as the sarcasm gets the better of her. She never much likes the ease with which she can use it, but it has helped her in the past. It will help her again. Because her evening is taking too long and her daughter will be in bed by the time she is able to creep into her own. Paul looks at her with glassy eyes as if he had lost all stomach he had ever had for liquor. Or maybe it's something else. She's fed up and she'll have no more of their game.

"So, agent Mahone?" she askes in her coldest voice that worked well before in the semi-legal interrogations of caught enemy agents. "Are you quite done or do I have to call security to escort you to the door? My patience is at the end, no matter if you've been hired by the presidential candidate Kellerman or Jesus Christ the Saviour in person." She purposefully speaks of God again and hopes He will forgive her mentioning his name in vain. She was already forgiven so much.

"She's clean," Mahone tells to Paul, disappointed, incredulous and completely confused. Kelly wonders what did Paul exactly tell him about her and the nature of their previous association. Nothing nice, she presumes as the agent continues the briefing: "I mean clean all over, licensed, no illicit activity in the past 10 years. She can have a rehab for rich people who pretend to be ill in this place, or perform highly experimental brain surgeries if she wishes to. Which medical activity she chooses is entirely up to her, and she has all the necessary authorizations. This room frightens me by how safe and clean it is, but she is entitled to extreme security measures in her private office if she so wishes and if she can pay for them, which apparently she can. Her previous file from when she worked for the government is inaccessible with my rather high level of security clearance."

"Like mine," Paul says.

"Like yours," Kelly agrees and pours herself whiskey number five to celebrate, decided to fast for the next four days consecutively, in order to be mentally fit for Mr Morris' surgery. That is the thing that _can't_ go wrong for more reasons than she can count. "If you don't mind, gentlemen, I'm getting older and I'd like to call it a day."

She accompanies them to the door and picks up her personal belongings nervously among the mayhem in her office. The secretary is long gone so she has to call a taxi. Everyone is gone except for the night crew of the clinic and the patients. It would not do to drive in her condition. Before the taxi appears on a car drive in front of _her_ clinic, (no matter what, she is rather proud of St Agatha as her clinic), she removes the secret door in the floor of her office and presses the button which is going to jam the air conditioning the next morning when she will not be there. All personnel will remain blocked in their offices, rooms and cells, and nearly suffocate before the fire brigade comes from Helena and breaks in. Ralph's orders. She has to obey them like a good soldier.

She hopes to God Ralph is write about this too, and that it will help Michael Scofield do what they need him to do, rather than to just cause heart attacks and more accidental deaths than she would like to have mentioned in her CV for the future.

Adelaide will sleep when she comes home, more is a pity. Not to see your daughter grow as much as you would wish to.

When the taxi turns around to leave the clinic, she sees them both in the car parked deep in the forest, Paul _and_ Mahone. She hums with resignation realizing that they will follow her home to nose around her block for anything suspicios; she leans in the back of the car seat and gives in to the overwhelming exhaustion, whistling a sad tune she learned in Africa. To hide a disappointment that Paul didn't wait for her on his own, apparently still too afraid of her to try anything he might like. She regrets it still, as her eyes and her body decide to shut down.

Kelly Davis drifts to sleep.

xxxxxxxx

**Michael's room, St Agatha, Saturday, 10 am**

It starts getting hot while he (Michael, he has to remind himself not to forget his name every single day), while Michael is having breakfast, using his fingers on eggs and bacon, only because he can. Just like he occasionally still wiggles his toes after waking up, to confirm that he's alive. The window of his room closes, the door clicks (un)safely in place. There are no keys in St Agatha; there are cards for staff, and automated locking mechanisms in case of anomalies.

The sun is thus locked out of his window, yet it becomes unbearably hot inside. He doesn't know how he knows it but he does know it's all _wrong._ Contemporary well-designed and well constructed buildings such as the one where he is locked up do not behave that way in any other circumstances.

Michael still finishes his breakfast, especially his coffee and his orange juice. The importance of staying hydrated appearing in his mind like so many other things he doesn't understand. Increasingly worried, he takes a spoon and approaches the window, easier to breach. In twenty minutes he lets in a bit of hot air from the outside through that window, a current of stale air which is still way more natural than what is inside. One sweating hour later, the spoon is under the door, creating just enough room to fool the blocking mechanism. Several knife clicks away and the door creaks open. All people in the clinic seem to be locked in their respective cubicles, except that his little manoeuvre unblocked the path to the viewing room. The place with a large screen from which he is being monitored despite that on his side, from his room, it looks like just another dull wall. He often wonders if the other three walls lead to similar observation points, each looking at a different set of parameters.

Two men in white coats lay asleep at their working posts from the lack of air. He hastily cracks one of the windows open with cutlery, to make it safer, but not before he views all the screens, clicking with the mouse to reveal as much of the complex he is being held in as possible, before being in a danger to faint too, from the lack of oxygen, and extreme heat.

The information is abundant and Michael grabs a pen from the desks in front of him and draws the map of the facilities obsessively on his arms, his thighs, his abdomen, before recovering the freshly painted skin in a hurry, as a child stealing sweets from the closet before the parents come home. He thinks he may have another fifteen minutes before his guardians are awake and see he is missing, not enough time to find the exit and run. His sketches reveal he is too deep in the complex for that.

Another thing immediately attracts his attention.

Sara wears an orange top, _not yellow_ , he regrets, but the one she's wearing will do just fine for him. What puts him on edge is that she is laying on the floor of her office, next to her desk, the place he has never been, but it is somewhere behind the windowless room he was taken to be examined by her.

He double checks the screens, happy that the men are not waking up yet.

He's got ten minutes, he knows now. He uses the mouse again, tries to remember the way he was taken there, knows they have been walking him around on purpose. Remembers anyway. He realises there is a wall of reinforced metal between the wing he is in and the wing where she's asleep. He tries to lift a panel on the ceiling, but there is no passage for ventilation as it should be. _New building_ , he thinks, _in a place where it can get really cold in winter._

He tries the floor. There is no visible opening but he can lift a slab after a bit of probing, and there, there is floor heating installed and there is also a passage, not very high, but he can crawl through it in... 5 minutes, hopefully, 5 to go there, and 5 to get back. He's not that far. He has his hat on since he left the room, he doesn't know why. Probably because if Kelly is right and if he's some sort of a criminal people have seen on television, his face and voice won't comfort anyone. On the contrary. He doesn't know what he wants from Sara, but to frighten her is not that. His newly discovered skills with cutlery scare him to begin with. He wonders if he was a gun, if he would know how to fire it. He hopes that he wouldn't but he is not certain.

So he crawls under the floors, and makes one wrong turn, but he is rewarded in the end. He can pass to her wing, and he knows that this passage only exists because the building is so new that some details have not been finished yet. He has no idea about Kelly's schedule of works needed to complete the process, but soon, very soon even, the passage he is in will be closed, except on a few points where space is necessary for maintenance.

Six minutes. He will probably never make it back on time but he has made it to her room. Breakfast knife still in his hands, he opens the windows, carries her, almost drags her to one of them. Sara stirs in his arms saying hmmmm, and it's familiar. He opens the first too buttons on her pale orange top, a silky sleeveless thing. And he wishes he can stay. He can't. Irrationally, he lifts the stupid hat for bees he's wearing just enough to place a small kiss on her neck, just above her shoulder. She stirs further, and her arms grasp his shoulders. He has to leave her half laying on a wide window sill, next to the source of air, not fresh, but air nonetheless.

Before he goes, he sees the paper bird on her desk. Heart swollen with equal parts joy and grief, he moves it an inch to the right.

He is back to his wing by the time the alarm goes on, and the sirens of the fire brigade can be heard in the distance. The two people tasked with viewing him that morning are waking up slowly, rubbing their eyes, but they are too dizzy to notice that the guinea pig they had been watching is passing behind them, straw hat over his face. He closes his window and his door again, and they are immediately unblocked by the safety system that time. By the time his gaolers finish winking, he lies on the floor of his room, pretending to wake up, and he wipes a patch of salty liquid from his eyes.

 _I'm crying,_ he concludes, not knowing why.

Xxxxx

Sara wakes up at the window where she didn't fall asleep, and finds the top she wears unbuttoned. She opens her eyes with difficulty and sticks her head through the window. Breathes in and breathed out as the midday sun burns her nose, and she worries for a second if she'll get freckles. The yard is full of firemen and ambulances, people are carried out on stretchers, victims are fighting for air.

She understands something went wrong and the building locked up by mistake. She doesn't understand why her windows are open while the firemen are still fighting to open the rest. A man wearing the sign of red cross ventures in, asks if she is all right.

"Yes," she says. But she isn't. Maybe coming to Montana was not the best idea. She goes back to the window and feels crazy. She looks at her top in the window glass. Runs to the looking glass to check her findings. They are there.

Fingerprints, traces of fat. Under her shoulders and nearing her breasts. Someone with dirty hands picked her up _like that, like that, like that._ Like Michael did when he caught her in Fox River when she jumped down from the path they took together through the ceilings when there was a riot in the prison, and he came to save her.

There is no Michael now, but someone has still been there and made sure she was all right. She doesn't know yet the odds of not being fine after the incident. She will count that equation later when she sees the statistics about quality and quantity of injuries. She feels cared for, safe, when Kelly Davis bursts in and asks if everything is okay.

She nods, "okay," she says, unsure why her boss is so much worried about her safety all of a sudden. It's abnormal even if it flatters her ego. She sees the paper bird again, the one she didn't throw away by accident, she lies to herself. The bird has been moved an inch from where it stands, at her screen. Moved, a sign. Moved, a signature.

 _Michael,_ she sighs, inwardly, and she thinks she will cry. She tells herself she's a physician first of all. Maybe the rich origami lover on vacation in St Agatha needs help. Maybe he's lonely and likes adventure. Still an image of a straw hat running on all fours through the ceilings to help her makes her laugh, loudly. She stands on the chair and tries to see if there's is any space up there, but there isn't. And the door has been locked before the fireman opened it.

That's strange. Unless her saviour was a ghost and walked through the walls, she had no idea how he reached her in her room and went away equally fast.

Also something only Michael would be capable of.

But Michael is not there.

xxxxx

**Ralph's room, ward for incurable patients, St Agatha**

"Was that your plan all along, Roger?" Kelly asks him after switching off the local surveillance circuit using her personal card and code. They don't need recordings now and she is entitled to do that. There is this thing called the doctor-patient confidence. Her supervision team within the state authorities will not doubt her because of that. "She could have died the way her office is positioned."

"She is expendable," Roger says.

"I agree," Kelly replies immediately, "but we may have need of her if your first little plan doesn't work."

"Sorry for not being sentimental like you are, Kelly," Roger says, "but I had to see if your Michael was as smart as you say, before I try my own luck with him. Now I am more convinced that he can do what I need him to do."

"Thank you so much for trusting me, Roger," Kelly says and stops regretting what could have happened to Sara. She has just learned another thing, and she hopes that Ralph didn't notice. Ralph thinks of Kelly as if she is also expendable. But Kelly doesn't, and she will do all in her powers, and that's a lot, to end up their joint venture on equal footing. Ralph can be thankful that she is reasonably fair in doing business, she will not try to take all the benefits for herself, leaving Ralph good and dead after they are done. She will let him keep his miserable life. But she will not let _him_ handle the plans for the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, that people would pay millions to possess. Those valuables she intends to trade herself as she sees fit. Once she finds out where Ralph has them in the first place.

"Is Mr Morris ready?" Roger asks laying on his bed, gazing at the garden from his ground floor window.

"Almost, Kelly says, following his gaze, "if your little stunt didn't cause a legitimate need for a few days of sick leave to our only general physician, we could have proceeded before Bagwell arrives."

"Best wait for Bagwell," Roger says.

"Another test of yours?" she hisses, very pissed off.

"Let's just say, the more, the merrier. Look!

She does, and in the bottom of the garden there is Michael who is pretending to be gardening next to Sucre, camouflaged in his new attire that protects his head against the sun. Michael doesn't recognize his former cellmate, just like he didn't recognise his own wife. _But he saved her nevertheless,_ Kelly thinks, glad the she was right about his abilities and his intelligence, to a certain point. She doesn't know yet for sure if she was right all the way.

"Well," she tells Ralph to distract him from the two men, "at least what you did proves my basic theory. When he is put in a similar situation, it will trigger the same responses. Once he saved his wife-to-be in a potentially life threatening situation in Fox River. We just have to make him believe you destiny is similar to Lincoln's and you will be out before September."

Ralph only thinks about himself at that moment, about his hopes to finally break out of the state custody after ten long years, and it is in that moment that Kelly sees Michael stealing a shovel from Sucre, one in a set of many her new employee brought out to work. She is relieved that Sucre is as clumsy as a gardener as when he was trying to be a thief, and ended up as an convict. Michael is soon gone with the shovel, and Kelly knows that the attendants won't find it in his room.

Ralph hasn't seen a thing.

Michael will now probably start digging, somewhere, and it will allow Kelly to make a test of her own.

In full consciousness that she is a dead woman if anything goes wrong.

"Roger," she tells her patient and her prisoner just before switching the surveillance system back on. (If she doesn't, it will go back on automatically after a certain time, the building is too smart to fool. For most people, that is.) "It's the last time I am pressing switches for you without knowing more of your plans and their consequences. Next time feel free to find your way through the sewers to my office, if you want to do any more tests."

"I've always loved your humour, Kelly," Roger says and touches her face, removes a black sharp hair from her ice blue eyes. "I would make you feel much better than Paul ever did."

"It's intriguing," she says, licking her lips, which have turned too dry from a maniacal ride back to St Agatha's, still not fully recovered from the night before. "But the policy of St Agatha says I will not mess up with patients. Once this is over, you'd be welcome to try your luck in my pants."

With that, she switches the surveillance on, pressing a switch for Roger, after all.

xxxxxx

Before Sara goes home in the late afternoon, after a day spent drinking water and recovering, she is obliged to halt next to _that_ place in the wall. She breathes towards the imperceptible hole, and she blows two words in the direction of the inside. "Thank you," she whispers. She knows there is no one on the other side, listening , only a product of her fantasies.

But it feels good to be thanking someone again. Even if he is not real.

She makes two steps to leave, turns her head around and smiles to the wall, as if it was a fence in Fox River behind which Michael would watch her. One skilled hand on the wires, one sweaty grey T-shirt over his compact shoulders.

She smiles fully, like a flower spreading its petals to the sun, before she finds the composure to walk away. (She doesn't think of Mikey ever since she woke up at the window of her office until that moment, which is more than she can usually exist without thinking of her son.)

Montana may be good after all. She doesn't know where it will take her in the end, but she feels a bit more alive with every single day.


	6. The Surgery

**St. Agatha's, Theodore Bagwell's room**

T-Bag's new room is large and has a garden view. (He refuses to call it _cell,_ such a vulgar name, not worthy of his new _accommodation_ in this fine clinic.) He has a roommate (not a _cellmate_ ) who is most likely another inmate with mental troubles like Theodore. But he at least seems like he was an honest successful businessman, cordial, college educated and entrepreneurial by nature, a dream of every American man and woman. They share a civil conversation about the role of _innovation_ and _new technologies_ in modern day industry and T-Bag actually enjoys it, only slightly regretting that he is not attracted to the man. So he will have to look elsewhere for a partner to alleviate _that_ part of his inner tensions. If he doesn't find anyone, he will just get less picky and go for his cellie. ( _Roommate,_ he corrects only one part of his dirty thoughts.) He has no clue about the subjects they are discussing, but his roommate calls Theodore's ideas "fresh", looking at him as if he truly means it.

 _There have to be other guests in this place,_ he thinks enjoying the view and an excellent meal he was served, incomparably better than in Fox River. Chicken _soufflé._ T-Bag smirks at his face in a mirror facing one of the beds. _We only miss a small glass of some liquor,_ he daydreams, sprawled languidly on his comfortable bed.

At 18.00 sharp an attendant shows up bringing two glasses of finest French cognac on a plate. T-Bag has never had anything like that in his life, not even close, including when he posed as a business genius in a company.

"Cheers," says Mr John T. Morris, his roommate, and T-Bag cannot help but smile, not believing his luck.

St Agatha's is a paradise on earth. And he's lucky to be in it.

**Sara's Office, St Agatha**

She is looking at the blood work of Mr Morris and she doesn't understand. The results are good and Mr Morris seems to be in a good physical health. Yet the extension of medical evaluation required from her on a job slip she got by email from Kelly is way too great for a standard follow-up of rich individuals spending the time of their leisure in St Agatha.

It bothers her, so she logs in her computer and checks which room Mr Morris is in. It turns out he is well registered as a _patient_ in the hospital, on an inpatient, not outpatient treatment, yet the room he is attributed by the initial check-in system does not exist in St Agatha. Unless there are parts of the clinic she is now supposed to know existed. Or there is something she doesn't quite get with her computer. She thinks she should ask Kelly. She thinks of it better and decides to keep it quiet and to do first a little investigation on her own.

Mr John T. Morris is a friendly man, and unlike the patients she has seen so far, he doesn't seem to be suffering from any kind of psychological trouble. He is plain, self-assured, and more straightforward than her late father. So she tries asking: "Any particular reason you requested all these tests to be performed?"

"No, Madam," he says, "I have no idea what they all entail. I trust the personnel in this clinic to order what is best. This establishment has high recommendations."

"Well, in that case you will be happy to know that all the preliminary results are in and you are fine on all counts."

"Great," the man is truly pleased. "I'm looking forward to the next step," he says with something like folly in his eyes, or maybe foolish hope. She doesn't like his expression.

Sara wonders what the next step could be but she can't think fast enough of another non obvious manner to fish out more information from Mr Morris. When he leaves, she compares the extent of the check-up performed with nearly everything she learned in medical school.

 _A preparation for a surgery, no doubt,_ she concludes. _An extensive, long lasting one._ The only thing missing on her job slip is the opinion of the anaesthesiologist. She is not one and St. Agatha does not have one. Or should not have one as far as she knows. She checks the credentials of all employed paramedical personnel and care takers in the clinic she knows. No one. She checks further into the CVs of the kitchen and the security personnel. Among security files, she sees red. Mr Mark Riley, night guard, holds a degree of a known UK school in anaesthesiology. Further digging shows his name is missing from the rotating schedule of the guards of one main and two side entrances to St Agatha that she is aware of. So either there is another entrance she doesn't know about, or Mr Riley does not work as a guard at all.

She doesn't know which possibility scares her more.

Until there is a third one, even more dreadful. When she comes home that evening, (forcing herself not to stop at _that_ part of the wall as she did every day until the anomaly), Mikey is not alone. (The two days of sick leave she spent at home after the accident were enough to convince herself that she was getting crazy and that she had to stop looking for hints and signs where there were none. She cannot be caught talking to a wall. Only the origami crane still lives at her desk. She has no heart left to throw it away.)

Lincoln and Kellerman are seated on her couch, watching a football match on _her_ TV, and her son makes gestures of desperation.

"They have just arrived, mom," he says. "I know you love uncle Lincoln, but I have no idea who this one is."

That one shows a black eye. Sara looks at her son inquisitively.

"Oh, that," Mikey says. "Adelaide was here. Her mom, Mrs Esperança, got it all wrong, she thought Mr-"

"-Kellerman," Paul fills in the name.

"She thought that Mr Kellerman wanted to kidnap Adelaide. Like the bad men in the cartoon do."

"It was a misunderstanding," Kellerman says.

Sara nods and tells her son: "You were a good boy, Mikey. But now it's time to sleep."

"May I still play with uncle Lincoln?" Mikey doesn't agree.

"Tomorrow," Linclon helps, luckily. "Listen to your mother. She knows best. I can put you to bed if she allows."

Sara nods again but as she does that her hand is in the drawer under the bar. When Lincoln and Mikey are out of the room, she turns back and she is pointing a gun at Paul. Just in case. He may have witnessed in her favour, in Lincoln's favour, but he is still the guy who would have drowned her in the hotel room sink, and she doesn't quite trust him.

"How is life?" she asks, carelessly.

"Never better," Paul grins and cleans his throat. "Came here to pay a visit to an old _business_ friend of mine." He stresses the word business in a most sinister way, and Sara begins to worry.

"How nice," she says, "how is he? Not much business for people like you in a place like Helena, I guess, now that Terrence Steadman is dead."

" _She_ is doing fine, this friend of mine," Kellerman says ignoring her insinuations. "Her name is Kelly. Kelly Davis."

The gun in her hand nearly trembles but she grips it harder, stilling it with the sheer force of her mind.

"Oh yeah?" she fakes not being impressed. "I didn't realize you used to work as a shrink."

"Kelly is no shrink," he informs her. "She's a surgeon by education. It should be pretty easy for another doctor like you to check that. Her school and all that stuff. And she's a damn good surgeon, some people would say, except that she has never worked in a conventional medical institution until now, if you understand what I mean."

"I am not quite sure that I do," Sara says coldly, but she's afraid she knows exactly what Paul means.

"Think of what a surgeon can do in a line of work I was taking for Caroline Reynolds," Paul says sweetly. "There are more, and more cruel ways to protect one's charge and eliminate threats than what I have been trained in, or good at."

"I see," Sara says and sighs with relief because Lincoln is already back. Mikey falls asleep faster with his uncle than with her. Which only makes her wonder what miracles a father's presence could do with him. "I heard him, Lincoln," she tells her brother in law understanding why he is paying her a visit. "I heard him and I don't believe any of it. I haven't seen a sign of anything unusual in St Agatha."

Except that she did. A week ago she nearly died and today she did a check up on a man whose room didn't exist, for a procedure not performed in an exclusive resort for medical tourism and relaxation of body and mind she _thinks_ she is working in. They only miss yoga lessons on the public side of the offer and she thinks that they might come.

"We'll hang around the city for a few days," Lincoln says, "then go and see the native American way of living higher up north and that. It's almost time for summer holidays, maybe LJ can visit us as well when his school is finished."

"And I am on a break in my campaign for health reasons," Paul informs her and she hates them both for being there, and for probably being right. Lincoln is not too fond of Paul either, the presence of Michael's brother in her living a silent witness that Kellerman may have a point in warning her.

"You'd better be out of here in a week," she tells them, "I will let you use my microwave for that long and then it's over! I'll call the police to kick you out if necessary."

She knows that they will not listen, but at least she has to try.

xxxxxxxxxxx

**Garden of St Agatha**

"So how do you like it here?" the boss asks him, and Sucre doesn't know what to say. Yes, one of his shovels is missing, and it shouldn't be. But that is not reason enough for the administration of the clinic to spy on an honest man, or for the Chief Executive Officer to pay him a visit. She is good looking, black short hair getting in her eyes, cold blue eyes which sometimes show signs of fire as if they were dark brown or black, as truly beautiful _passionate_ eyes have to be. _Maybe she came to enjoy the sun,_ Sucre tells himself working on a patch of blue hydrangeas where the thick growth of the blossoming plants needs to be somewhat lessened to leave more room for flowering. Kelly is seated on a bench behind him, nose stuck towards the sun, her skin slightly yellow, so she is probably not afraid of getting burned. Even if a patch of skin under her shirt is much paler, revealing its natural colour. _Plenty of sitting in the sun or those horrible lotions women use to get sun tanned_ , Sucre thinks in dismay about Kelly's face. When he sees such unnatural thing he misses Maricruz and her naturally beautiful skin even more. He's been in St Agatha for a bit more than a week, avoiding Sara, which is not difficult because he is employed in a part of the clinic not registered to exist, and other than that he hasn't noticed a singular thing which is out of order. _Yet,_ he tells himself.

"Have you noticed him before?" Kelly asks then, pointing at another man dressed like a gardener, except that a big straw hat surrounded by a kind of veil made of some kind of gauze hides his face. Sucre shakes his head to say _"no" and_ continues to work around the flowers.

"Look, then," she insists. "He's our new patient, he arrived shortly before you were employed, Mr Sucre. You were even gardening together before he was confined to his own quarters due to his condition."

"I understand," he says even if he doesn't. Ms Davies' eyes flash with _that_ fire which either amazes him, or makes him feel really uneasy about the state of things in St Agatha. "Do you? I wonder..." she says, teasing him, removing a strand of pointy black hair from her eyes.

"He is recovering from a difficult and possibly life threatening brain surgery," she states, serious as if she was on her mother's funeral.

"Brain surgery," he repeats, and maybe, maybe he is beginning to understand.

"After such surgeries," Kelly explains to Sucre as if he was a high school student. And not a very gifted one as that. Even when he was at high school, Fernando was never any good in those science things. "After such surgeries, men can sometimes forget who they are, and it takes a terrible lot of time for them to recover, _if_ they recover properly at all.

The second gardener sits in the grass and seems to be observing its growth, immobile like a plant. He sits in a completely enclosed part of the garden where not even Sucre is allowed. Only a few man are occasionally pacing up and down in it, Fernando noticed, and always only one at the time, in regular periods of time. "And they should stay out of the sun," Sucre completes Kelly's thought.

"Yes," she confirms. "Well, I am glad that you don't see him as anything special," she says and she leaves. That more than anything spurs Sucre's desire to take a good look at the man under the gauze. Miss Davis was very tense and on the edge of _something_ all the time during their conversation and Sucre wonders what it was. She was staring at her hands as if they were dirty, or covered in innocent blood, occasionally flexing her fingers and her wrists. Sucre still finishes his work with the flowers, in case he is being watched, before walking lazily to the fence of the second part of the garden where the man with the hat watches the grass growing and the world turn.

Sucre observes him in silence for the entire two minutes before he loses patience. "Hey, you!" he calls the man. "It's such good weather today, isn't it?.

"Yeah," the young voice says, "I was wondering what is under this grass."

The voice is oddly familiar and Sucre needs to hear more. "Ground!" he yelps. "What else would there be?"

"Wires," the other man says, "circuits, short circuits, death."

"Not good for flowers," Sucre said.

"Not good at all," the other man said and turns around so that Fernando can now see him from the front. He still doesn't see his face but his guts tell him it can't be anyone else.

"Ave Maria Santísima," he murmurs, making the sign of a cross. He kisses a cross he is wearing on a thin chain around his neck. "Papi…"

Behind the bars, again, it is his best friend who has come back from the dead.

Michael Scofield is alive.

"Not papi," Michael says in a friendly voice, as if his presence here is not shocking, as if he doesn't own them all an explanation. "They tell me my name is Michael."

"Isn't it, papi?" Fernando asks, expecting a story of _what_ has happened. He has a right to an explanation, he thinks, him, and Sara and Lincoln… He will give him a minute before he presses him for answers.

"I don't know," Michael says honestly, "it might be. You won't believe me, why should you, but it's just that I don't remember."

There is no lie in his voice or stature, and it is so obvious all of a sudden. Fernando can't figure how he could have ever thought differently. Michael Scofield wouldn't let any of them live through his death if he knew about it. He always cared for other people more than he cared for himself, and perhaps in his new life, it's time for that to stop. If possible at all.

"Papi…" Sucre says again, tearing at his short hairstyle with both hands. He swallows and tries to say something nice until he can think about what he should do. "Michael is a good name. He is an archangel who defeats the devil."

"I see," Michael says, "I didn't know that. So then it's not such a bad name after all."

 _Not at all,_ Sucre thinks, but he doesn't say anything else. His first impulse is to run to Sara who has no idea even that Sucre is there, working in the same place where she does, only on the other side of the walled precinct. But he thinks better of it. A little more time will not harm anyone after five years. He will keep quiet about it until Michael gets better and becomes himself, or at least until he can learn a bit more about what is going on. Because if Michael is alive, there might be some really evil people all around them. And he, Sucre, has to be really careful if he doesn't want anyone to be hurt and become as dead as Michael Scofield was supposed to be.

xxxxxxxxx

**St. Agatha's, Theodore Bagwell's room, one day later, around noon**

T-Bag remembered how Mr Morris went to take some air after breakfast on his two feet. Yet he has returned to his room on his back, immobile. He was brought in on a hospital bed with four or five attendants fussing around him, bringing some machines to hook him on them for life support. T-Bag could only stare and listen when they worked".

"He seemed so strong," one attendant complains.

"He was," another one, a female, says and T-Bag licks his lips because she is not _bad_ at all. Dark-haired and tiny. Reminds him a bit of the director of this prison whom he had seen once for five minutes when he arrived. _Kelly..._ He would fuck her against the first wall if he only had a chance. He didn't have it so far. But maybe he will still get one. _Good old T-Bag doesn 't give up that easily,_ the familiar knowledge makes him happy, and almost giddy from excitement.

"They rarely make it past the surgery," the third one says.

"At least he made that," the female says again.

"Little luck in that," says the fourth one, the fat man who hasn't spoken yet. "He will be attached to the machines until they switch them off, just like all others before him."

Mr Morris is left in his bed, plenty of wires, infusions and tubes around him, or stemming from his body. One half of a leisure room for two looks all of the sudden like a full fledged hospital, and the cognac from the day before gets a bitter taste in T-Bag's mouth.

"This procedure Mr Morris has undergone," he asks the attendants innocently, presenting his best face and getting out his best use of language, "is it habitual?"

"Mr Bagwell," the female tells him, "all patients in this wing are supposed to undergo the procedure. You have signed an authorisation yourself before arrival."

T-Bag doesn't want to fuck the woman anymore, he wants to squash her skull or break it open with a piece of the high-tech medical equipment from the bloody room, but there are four other attendants inside and he wouldn't get very far. The food he receives that day is still better than in Fox River but it's not extraordinary. There is no liquor served at 6 o'clock.

He remembers signing a folder of documents in Fox River before he was transferred to St Agatha, without reading any of them, obviously. All he saw was a picture of a sunny garden, comfortable rooms and professional attendants. He wants to scream and hit the wall with his head, now that he learned the price of it. He nearly breaks the mirror with his fists, but he gives up on doing that at the last possible moment before irreparable damage is done to the precious looking glass. _Artistic frame,_ T-Bag thinks, admiring the mirror.

Probably he got into that entire mess because of his greediness to enjoy what little life has to offer to a mentally handicapped man like himself. St Agatha needs to have really convincing scientific title, something like, studying the brains of the demented people to develop cures and prevent re-occurrence of disease in general population. He cannot think of an adequate name, but there surely as hell is one. But even if it is not called that way, in reality, St Agatha is not a resort, and his room is not a room but a cell. The food and the cognac were the last wishes of a man dying, and T-Bag finally understands. _He is a prisoner in a death row._

He has to break out of there.

The sooner, the better.

xxxxxxxxx

**Michaels's room, St Agatha, some time deep at night after Mr Morris surgery**

She didn't approach the wall, his wall, their wall, for almost a week.

The sensation hurts. He has no right to her, and she has no idea he had saved her. Even he himself has no idea what he saved her from. But it still pains him and he would wish her to halt, whisper something like she did on that day, anything, to a hole that started meaning his whole life, or just stop at a short distance from it, turn around and smile.

When she did that, he leaned one of his arms high up on the wall, pressed his forehead to the cold stony surface, and just stared through the minuscule opening until the approaching steps from the inside the building called him to order, and he had to withdraw. It wouldn't do for any of the attendants to see what he was doing.

He didn't see Roger, or Kelly for a week either. He doesn't know this man, Roger. Yet he seems friendly and fatherly at the same time. _Like… Like an older brother! That's it,_ Michael thinks, _that's it. He could be my older brother if I had one._ He wonders if he has one. Or a younger brother. Or a sister. He would ask Kelly such things but she hasn't shown up either. _The man, Roger, he was afraid_ , Michael remembers, and decides to ask more about it if he ever sees him again. By now he is so lonely with his doubts and lack of knowledge about anything that he could talk to his own image in a pool of water, just to forget about his condition.

The first good thing that happens is the gardener. He is not like Roger. He inspires a different kind of confidence, and tells him something nice about his name. _St Michael, the archangel_. It's preposterous, but at least it is positive. He regrets not asking the gardener what his name was. Maybe next day. The shovel is hidden in a shallow grave, more scraped out than dug, in front of the wall through which he has seen Sara, through which he had been on the lookout for Sara every single day since she smiled at him.

He soon found he couldn't dig much deeper than the shallow hole he made at the very beginning of his garden breaks when he was most certain none of the attendants was watching. There was some kind of security system within the ground, very modern, and very difficult to fool.

 _Why should I dig?_ He still doesn't know. There's no one on the outside waiting for him as far a he had been told and even if he asks Kelly about his real family he doesn't believe that she would tell him the truth.

He cannot catch sleep, cannot catch sleep. From the open window a few floors below, he hears an inhuman cry of a man screaming with despair, as if he was being cut open alive. He shivers. The commotion is soon over but he finds it damn difficult to forget that sound and all the questions about what it meant. He looks out at the night sky and focuses on the moon, almost full but not quite.

The shadows of grey look different on the walls of his room in moonlight, between marvelous and threatening.

 _What are they doing to people down here?_ he wonders. _What will they do to me?_

His determination to talk to Roger, and Kelly, grows.

But when he finally manages to fall asleep in his hospital bed, after he had examined all the irregularities in the window frame and glass for the hundredth time (because that is how his brain works, and he cannot stop it from working), after he did all that, the mind finally relaxes, and he only sees the woman who wouldn't come to the wall anymore to see him.

Maybe she is the reason he should dig. Get out and tell her he's in love with her. _What a pick up line it would be_ , he thinks. _Hello, Sara_ , he'd say, _I have no idea who I am but I know I'm in love with you._

If he frightens her, he can always go back.


	7. The Dress

**In front of St Agatha**

Years later, she will still never know why she wore that dress on that particular day.

It _is_ the hottest day since she came to Montana, and the temperature in the sun is suffocating. She thought summer in Helena would be colder than in Chicago. But the only freshness to be found is during the late hours of the night; in the amazingly warm summer nights, even within the city. She has never spent the night in the clinic but she imagines that in St Agatha, situated high up and above the civilization, in the green, it has to be even better.

She still hates dresses. It's just not her style. Jeans and T-shirt are good enough for her, and her figure is such that she doesn't have to change her habits when getting older. She wore a dress on her wedding day, and she wears one on every anniversary of Michael's death. (Because it reminds her vividly enough of how he looked at her on their wedding day, and she never wants to forget that look). That about sums it up.

So the heat is not a reason good enough why she is now wearing a black casual knee-length dress, widening only so slightly at the bottom to provide some breeze to sweaty thighs when walking. Her shoulders are covered only by two very thin black straps crossing over her bare back. It's a summer dress, soft and simple. And, yes, the day is way too warm, but if she wanted to be completely casual she could have picked up something in lighter color, or with an innocent looking pattern.

That day she doesn't care about innocence and that day she stops, daringly, at that spot on the outside wall of the clinic where the unknown man should be. Where he should wait for her still after a week of ignoring him. If anyone, anyone, this unknown man, or anyone else, is _ever_ going to start taking Michael's place in her life, he should better be like him in more things than a mere predilection for origami and mind games.

She will never understand either why she was wearing her hair down on that day.

Normally, she would tie it up, in summer even more so.

She tells herself she does it because it is the only way to feel foolish enough to forget Kellerman is sleeping on her couch, her boss may be a mass murderer under the cover of a medical degree, and there are dangerous possibly _illicit_ surgeries going on in a peaceful clinic she was supposed to work for.

That is what she tells herself, knowing in the back of her mind it is not the whole truth.

Sara stands at the wall, briefly, with hesitation. She is two hours early for her work, so probably the patients are not even out yet, those she sees on a daily basis, and those that are hidden elsewhere. He cannot be waiting for her, she knows, yet she expects it of him, as if she was in a position to influence his mind. She makes a mental note of the terrain of the clinic as she believes that it looks, the part that she is shown. The part on the public layout hanging behind the entrance door. The only thing that is supposed to be behind the wall she is now staring at is a private garden, not belonging to the clinic.

But that is probably a lie, and she suspects that Mr Morris could be found on the other side of the wall too, just like the man she is looking for against her better judgement. _God knows in which conditions they are kept,_ she shivers at the thought, remembering Fox River. Mr Morris is the first candidate to suffer greatly for all she knows, in the company of God knows how many other patients waiting for their turn, her mystery man only one of them, the real lucrative business of the clinic hidden behind the closed door. She thinks she knows what it is, the only thing that makes sense, the promise to the incurable: a thread of hope, where no hope should be possible, thinner than the straps on her black dress.

She stands there for a minute until she feels utterly stupid and afraid that Kelly, Paul's _associate,_ could sneak behind her back and catch her in the act.

She hurries to her office and starts the computer, eager to check on a condition of a patient, Mr Morris. The white coat hides both her attire, her guilt, and her confusion. She should have said something more to Mr Morris. She's a doctor, she has sworn an oath, and she has to do something.

The computer blinks and beeps, merciless. The results of her search in St Agatha's database show on screen before a milisecond is gone by.

Mr John T. Morris died in the night.

The listed cause of death is _brain haemorrhage_.

She grips the origami crane and stares wildly at the screen.

Hours go by before she can stop herself from shaking.

xxxxxx

**Michael's room, St Agatha**

Michael is awake way before dawn.

Longingly, he looks at the driveway of the clinic from above, from afar, without any expectations to see her. He does it every morning just in case. A routine, a senseless repetition, just like the patterns of paint brush and damage caused by time on his room walls. He knows them by heart from too much consecutive study of his too detailed mind.

And then, then...

Not only that she is there, she is a vision of everything he would want in his life on a daily basis if he could choose. She's walking without stopping, in a simple black dress revealing her shoulders and half of her back. She goes covered with the conspicuous absence of textile and with soft curls falling, glowing faintly orange on the tips in the weak light of the morning.

Then, then, then, she stops _there,_ at their place, and her eyes are searching the wall.

 _She still remembers me,_ he thinks, regretting again that he didn't dare to speak to her the only time when they were both conscious and face to face. Well, _face to mask,_ he corrects himself. _Sara,_ he calls out to her as the heat is very slowly invading St Agatha. He knows that very soon they will come for him to let him in the garden. And he knows he will find a way to dig his way out around the alert system under the wall. There is one option he didn't try yet in his methodical mind. But for that he believes he should learn a thing or two about Kelly's private taste, to make it work. The data he glimpsed from the computers before he ran to Sara's aid indicated that Ms Davis had a strong personal role in the construction of the building, and that always counted for something. In the experience he knows he possesses but he can't entirely place it in a context, or even remember it correctly.

 _First things first_ , he tells himself. When the attendants come for him, he is determined to test his new hypothesis before he orchestrates a distraction powerful enough to warrant Kelly's presence. He will need it to obtain the key with which to fool entirely the security that has been put in place. The level of it is impressively high for a hospital, higher than in a prison, almost of a _military quality._ Knowing that makes him terribly afraid of who he is and of what he has done to gather such certainties in the first place. He must be a criminal at best, and a psychotic maniac could be a close second description. He could also work for law enforcement, or army. Both would explain his knowledge at some level, but it just doesn't sit right with him. He was none of that and he knows it.

Michael is out in the sun and his head is starting to boil despite a pile of gauze hiding his face from its glare. The shovel is where he had left it and soon he is half a meter under the ground where the signal and the sensors start. He avoids the first such sensor he finds, and he places the shovel a bit further until the soil is clean again. He probes the softened brown mass further, with great caution, testing the progression of the sensors in one direction several times. Than he changes it a bit, with different results. He is jubilant.

There is a pattern in the placement of the sensors, which would trigger an alarm if he digs further ( _or worse,_ he knows, _it could electrocute him on the spot, or emit dangerous radiation waves in his direction)_. It's irregular but it is there. He is a bit angry for not seeing it even before. He only has to find the correct key to switch it off, and than he can turn to tresspassing, and see where he is, and what is on the outside, for real.

He is done with his exploration way before the attendants should return. He wants to sit down and wait for that unavoidable conclusion of his morning when a commotion in another part of garden, from which he is fenced off, attracts all of his considerable attention span. The more he listens to it, the more nervous he gets on the inside, just like the four men speaking. Michael sits quietly in the grass, in a small shade projected by the wall, absorbing the information, grateful for the mask that hides his features.

xxxxxxx

**Larger section of the garden of St Agatha's closed ward**

The larger part of the garden is normally empty. But on that day when Michael is eager to be brought in, to provoke Kelly, to verify his assumptions, to break out and see Sara, to ask her why she stopped to see him that day, to ask her why she didn't do it for a week, on such a day, no one is coming for him. _Almost on purpose,_ he thinks and saves the thought for later consideration.

A familiar looking ugly man with a southern accent is annoying two other patients not too far from an observant pair of veiled blue-green eyes. They all wear grey hospital clothing, which could be prison clothing if a logo was only a little bit different. Or at least if it didn't include the miniature image of the saint which gave the clinic its name. The two men being tutored are seated on a bench. One is rather fat and dark-haired, the other thin and very young, barely more than a boy, in his early twenties.

"Are you crazy?" the ugly man asks them, convinced of his own truth, looking every bit crazier than his interlocutors, his muddy eyes glowing fanatically. "The two of you want to undergo this procedure? I'm telling you, my _friend,_ Mr Morris, he didn't last for a day after it, they took him away this morning lying flat, if you get my meaning."

"It's a calculated risk," the fatter one of his interlocutors says in a friendly way.

"We understand what it's all about," says the younger man, "and the fact that you are here means that so do you."

"I am not insane!" yells the ugly man whom Michael finds familiar. "My dad was a bit crazy but that's another matter. I just want to go back to the place I was before as is my right under the law of this country."

"I'm afraid it doesn't work that way," the boy replies, "Ms Davis will determine what your condition requires. I have full trust in her abilities."

"Tell me, if you know," the ugly man retorts, trying to look calm, where he is not, Michael knows it, "who is the next one on the death row?"

"He is," the second interlocutor points at the lonely almost grey haired sturdy man, crouching in one corner of the garden. It's Roger, Michael's almost friend. He doesn't look happy about the procedure. Worse, he seems to be praying, eyes turned up, eager to find something in the sky that doesn't exist on the earth below. _Faith is in the heart_ , Michaels knows it, but Roger's imploring position remains as real as the anger of the ugly man who is now studying him attentively.

"He doesn't seem to be thrilled about it or I am not called Theodore Bagwell," the southerner says in a tone of a preacher. The name echoes ominously in Michael's subconscious mind but he is unable to tell where he has heard it before. If he has heard it at all. His unease is such that he pushes his hat and the cover further down, wishing to melt in the wall he is leaning on, not to be noticed. _The southerner is trouble,_ Michael believes, _he cannot be trusted._

The fat man who favors the procedure informs and infuriates Bagwell further: "It is natural to be upset. The odds of success are not very high, but Ian here and me, we think that the alternative is much worse. We are at peace."

"It's a death sentence!" Theodore screams. "They gave Mr Morris a nice meal and than they just _killed_ him off. The state has no right to do this no matter what we have signed."

"The state can do whatever it wants to do. There's no way that an individual can stop it," Roger adds from the ground, philosophically. "I am trying to make my peace about it too, but it doesn't come easy."

"Mister," Ian tells Roger, disagreeing, "you should have thought of all that before you signed up. It is difficult either way, to live as we were living for the rest of our lives or to try for something better."

"How I wish I could go back," Roger says sincerely, "but it's too late for that. They have falsified my signature on the acceptance paper for this institution. My lawyer tried everything, but he could not do a thing about it. The court had the handwriting confirmed as mine."

Michael's heart goes out to Roger only at the moment of his professed innocence, strongly. He forgets why he has to be digging and for whom. A beast wakes up in his chest, and he thinks he cannot just leave by himself. Whatever this procedure is, that they want to do to Roger, the man didn't asked for it, he is forced to undergo it. And he might die as a result of it. Michael remembers the scream he had heard in the night and wonders if it was the unknown Mr Morris, passing. He doesn't know why his entire being rebels against leaving Roger to such destiny, but he cannot deny the rawness of the sensation. The facts are there, too, confirming that things are terribly wrong in St Agatha.

If he can go out, then there has to be a way to bring Roger too. He just has to think long and fast enough. The plan has to be sound.

"We have to break out," Theodore Bagwell says. The two men who are happy to be there just laugh and shake their heads.

Roger on the other hand says, confirming Michaels's findings under the ground: "It's impossible, son. St Agatha is better guarded than any military facility in this country. There is no way out."

 _There is always a way out,_ Michael thinks stubbornly, glad that he was left in the garden longer than usual. His vision narrows obsessively down to Roger, who is again praying in silence. He entirely misses the open window from where Kelly Davis is studying Michael, as keenly as her special patient had been observing the men talking among themselves.

When the attendants finally pick him up, Michael instinctively knows that he should only take Roger with him. Theodore Bagwell will stay exactly where he is. He can find his own way to freedom, but he'll never be part of the plan.

xxxxxxx

**Kelly's Private Office, later that evening**

"Nice performance," Kelly says to Ralph, reminding herself for the thousandth time to call him Roger, even in her dreams. "But you didn't think of one thing."

"And that is?" Roger asks, sprawled lazily on her happily red couch nursing the same glass of cognac that John T. Morris had tasted with T-Bag before the surgery.

"If Scofield fails to get you out soon enough, I will have to follow proper procedures. You will be placed in the secluded part within the restricted area, and if you are still not successful in leaving on time, I will have to operate on you. Meaning you would share the destiny of our friend Morris..."

Roger refutes her: "It has to be done that way to look credible. He still doesn't buy it fully in my opinion. He's on the way to where we want him to be but it has to get way more dramatic. We have to appeal to his base instincts he lived when his real brother was nearly put to death, to stimulate all his abilities of getting me out."

"And what if I have to..."

"If it goes that far, my dear," Roger says in a tone crying bloody murder, "I am sure that you will think of something to get indisposed and delay everything. You can shoot yourself in a leg or something... A hunting or a riding accident. Most sports can be so dangerous these days."

Kelly doesn't look forward to harming herself but she will do it if she has to. She has learned long ago that she is capable of doing anything if she has to. And she thinks that she may have just learned another precious, vital point, about Roger's end-game. The plans that Roger wants to trade to North Korea are hidden under her very nose, in St Agatha. She has no clue in which form, or format, but there can be no other reason why Roger wants to, no, needs to, be locked up in the secluded part before taking off. She knows that she will never find them on her own, even if she tears that part of the clinic down, stone by stone. Roger is not stupid and he would have hidden them well when he arrived to St Agatha. Too well. Her chances reside in observing him while he is there before he is able to retrieve them. If she is successful in that, than maybe, maybe, her final destiny will be better than the one she believes might await her. _Six feet under_ , a bit sooner than she would have wanted. As if anyone ever truly wanted that. It was against human nature.

"Get back to your cell," she growls at him as she would at an old friend, and he smiles, buying her display of affection. Or so she hopes because you never know with Roger. At least she didn't mentally call him Ralph for full five minutes. "The cognac has clouded your mind, and in two minutes the cameras will override my input and start filming you again. The guard is waiting on the outside to take you there."

"I was just on my way, darling," he jokes.

Roger kisses her before he leaves, square on her mouth, in the last thirty seconds that are not filmed. His lips leave a trail of dirt and she frantically brushes teeth when she is gone. _Some things should be plainly forbidden in any line of work,_ she thinks, feverishly pondering her next move.

xxxxx

**In the Wood near St Agatha**

Kelly finds that her day is far from over. When she finally drives away from the clinic, trying to forget the vegetative face of Mr John T. Morris after the surgery she performed, a car rides out from the forest and stops in the middle of the road, barring the way.

She doesn't need to look twice to know who that is.

_Paul._

When she steps out of the car, her gun is at ready, and his hands are up.

"Please don't," he says.

"I don't see why I wouldn't," she comments, emotionless, still feeling the awfulness of Ralph's tongue stuck somewhere in her gorge, tooth paste taste notwithstanding. "For an attempted assault, I would be in my right..."

"I didn't say you wouldn't," he says, dead serious and walks towards her. Walks towards her until she has to pull the trigger. Or not.

She doesn't fire the gun she's been holding, and the next taste in her mouth is so much better than anything she has felt in years. He will probably kill her with her own gun, but at least she won't go to her early grave tasting on Ralph.

They don't even reach the car.

There is soft grass on a meadow flanked by the tall trees on one side of the road. The day has been hot, and the sweet smell of plant life is more inebriating that the finest French cognac she didn't taste that night. She is entirely sober and there is no justification for what she is about to do. She doesn't know where her gun is and it doesn't really matter. It never mattered much with Paul.

"I should have done this immediately," he says, and sounds as if he means it. She doesn't reply but she agrees with his line of thinking, for a change, in its entirety. "Than maybe you would consider me as more than a piece of your expensive furniture."

She never thought of him as that, to tell the truth, but she likes the mental image he is projecting.

"Paul," she lets out when he is on top and sex comes so naturally to both of them that it frightens her.

Neither lasts very long even if she pretends to, keeping only the last inch of pride of not letting him _see_ how good it was for her. They roll away from one another on the grass, each retiring to a space of his or her own.

And then, he ruins it.

"Please, Kelly," he says, "whatever you are up to, could you please just not hurt Sara. I will be your punch bag, even your shooting target if you wish, but she has had enough."

 _This is about Sara,_ she realizes and suddenly she agrees with Roger. She is even able to remember the correct name again. _Sara is expendable._ She hates herself for it and agrees with Roger anyway.

"A wrong thing to say, as usual" she mutters through her brushed teeth, standing up, running back to her own vehicle, picking up her clothes together with the shreds of her dignity as she finally walks away. "See you around, Paul," she says. "I hope you will enjoy the rest of your stay in Montana. You haven't been here for a while. Since Caroline Reynolds has had her way with you before she dumped you like a dirt bag that you are."

He is too stunned to follow, murky eyes puzzled by her reaction, even if it is impossible that he is so stupid not to understand. Men _can be_ stupid, but not that much, not usually. _You_ don't have sex with a jealous cold blooded bitch like Kelly Davis and than plea in favor of another woman if you wish well to that person. Her car starts easily enough and despite the negativity of her thoughts, her body exhales a peaceful state of tiredness and fulfillment she only ever experienced with Paul the morning after. _The meadow after in this case_ , she thinks, bitterly. She hits his car when passing it, on purpose, and it is more than satisfactory to cause the damage. Her top level all risk insurance will pay readily for her own. Those are the benefits that go hand in hand with being a CEO of a prestigious establishment such as St Agatha.

She smells the wood through the open window, wishing Paul was her furniture. Than things would be simple and she could use him and abuse him as she eats with knife and fork every day.

But he is not.

Paul will never be hers to keep.

So it's for the best to forget all about him and drive on.


	8. The Key

**Garden, Michael's side, in front of the wall**

Sara was so distracted and... sad, unthinkably sad.

That seems to be the right word to describe how she ran from the building of the clinic past his small viewing point in the wall and far away, where he could no longer see her, at the end of what must be the end of her working hours. The time is all the same to him. Only the day and night passing make a small difference. She didn't stop and she didn't turn around. He cannot bear to see her that way. She should _smile,_ and frequently, Michael believes.

 _Is she in danger, too?_ Michael thinks how he needs to go out sooner rather than later and suppresses the objection of his consciousness reminding him he should not do it until he finds a solution to take Roger with him as well. _But what if something happens to Sara by that time?_ Kelly Davis doesn't look like a serial killer in a doctor's coat, but she has shown she is more than capable of murdering someone on purpose, on the surgery table. What else is she prepared to do? For the sake of some strange experiment going on, a sinister doing of some higher authority he doesn't care much to learn anything more about? He hates authority because it is always corrupt, or it had been, in his experience, every single time. _There is no honesty in any of them._ He is afraid of that conviction. Unable to pinpoint the origin of his negative experiences or what they all entailed in order to lead to such a strong and irrefutable belief on his part. _Or maybe I have killed more innocent people than Kelly did and they were right to treat me in any way they knew how, to stop me,_ he considers the possibility.

 _Why am I even alive then if Dr Davis is a monster?_ he asks himself at the same time, and he cannot find a logical answer to that, yet. Because Kelly operated _on him_ as well, that's actually one of the few things he is sure about. Still, he was not taken out by faceless attendants to be buried like Mr Morris was.

The fact is, Michael is sorry for Roger, but now that he had seen Sara leaving in distress, he is selfish and he focuses only on what he needs to do. He only knows one way to break out of the clinic which is safe enough and almost fool proof, and it will only be enough for one person if he can switch off the security system under ground. He does not know where Roger is kept, and if he breaks the alarm system as he plans, he is almost certain the code will rearrange itself intelligently in a different pattern as soon as one single person has passed through it and beyond the area of its protection.

A particularly crazy thought comes to him then, and all of a sudden he knows what he has to do. But in order to do it he will need some help. He cannot do it alone. The best candidate for the first task is... well... the gardener who told him about the meaning of his name. It's not nice to _use_ people like that but it has to be done.

"Hello!" he calls out to him at the end of the afternoon, shortly after Sara had left, wondering why he is _not_ surprised that the gardener comes to him immediately. "I need you to do something for me," he whispers and the man he has only just met obeys as if they were best friends in another life, as if Michael is entitled to ask him for _anything_.

"Papi," he says, "what can I do for you? Just say it."

"You could start by telling my your name," Michael semi-consciously smiles his best smile, hoping it would work.

"Sucre," the man answers, almost _hurt_ by his question, eyes alight, "Fernando Sucre."

"Okay, Sucre," Michael continues very carefully, not willing to offend his new friend. Maybe his only friend within the walls of St Agatha. It is absurd, but it is no less true for it. "Invent a reason for Ms Davies to give you a ride back to civilization tonight, and pay attention to her selection of music. Tell me if there is a song that she listens to twice or one she hums along with, those kind of things. Let me know if you find out anything first thing tomorrow morning. _Anything._ But it has to be before lunch, do you understand?"

The gardener nods. He will try and that's enough for Michael. "Please" he asks him once again, underlying his plea. "I have to know that."

"What will you do with knowledge, celebrate the first day of summer with some singing?" Sucre jokes half-heartedly.

 _That is tomorrow,_ Michael remembers, letting the gardener see the shovel he had stolen from him, hidden in the ground under his feet. Sucre grins and seems to need no further answers.

He is Kelly's gardener yet he nods as if digging under walls to break out of the clinic is something perfectly normal, and more, as if he didn't expect anything less from Michael. "Very good," he says, "I'm in. My own car was about to break down anyway."

xxxxxxxx

Sara packs her suitcases that night, doing her best to ignore Paul sleeping on her couch. If she didn't try so hard not to see him, she wouldn't miss the black circles under his eyes and a completely ravaged look about him, which is so unlike Paul, measured, intelligent and as evil as necessary. When she came home, her uninvited guest murmured something about Lincoln leaving town with Mahone, on a _mission,_ but she hasn't paid him much attention either. She is back in jeans and the black dress lies wrinkled on the floor.

 _I am leaving,_ she thinks. _This has all been an illusion, a dangerous one._

The letter of her resignation stands written in front of the mirror in the bedroom. She makes so much noise opening the closet doors and the flimsy drawers that she is done packing faster than usual. But there is also a tiny body standing in her door, in a pyjama with a friendly dinosaur image on his chest.

"Mom," Mikey asks, "are we leaving?"

She nods in agreement and Mikey starts explaining, nervously, despite that it's past 11 pm and he should be sleeping. "Adelaide invited me to stay over at her place, tomorrow. Can I go, please? I will be good! And you sad yourself that her mother is nice and trustworthy!"

"Mikey," she starts but her son interrupts her again. "Please! We can leave the day after if we have to and than I can ask for her address and write to her when I learn how to write! I can almost do it, Mom!"

She sits on her bed and the boy runs into her lap, butting her stomach with his head, returning to the behaviour of a one year old, which he does only when something she did or is about to do really disturbs him. She cradles him to her chest and then he begs again: "One more day, Mom, what can happen in a day?"

 _What can happen indeed?_ Her irrational afternoon desire to leave starts seeming equally ridiculous as her morning wish to meet the unknown patient from St Agatha in person, hoping he of all people might be able to one day replace Michael Scofield in her life, if not in her heart. _I dressed up for him, as if I had a date with an opening in the wall... I refused to do that for Michael in a little time we had to share… And then I doll up for this stranger…_ Sara is ashamed.

"Okay", she concedes to her son, "tomorrow evening I will drive you to your friend after work myself and when you return on the next day we will decide together what we should do. Is that all right?"

"That's just great, Mom!" Mikey exclaims and he means it, not a trace of sarcasm in his voice of a little boy, as there would always be with such simple phrases in his father's voice. It makes her want to cry. She doesn't cry because her son is there. He willingly lies in her bed, and in less than two minutes he is loudly snoring, sleeping on his back, both little arms raised high above his head. Sara is considering carrying him back to his bedroom but she would be visible to Paul if she did that. She would rather avoid any conversation if her uninvited guest wakes up to pay a nightly visit to her fridge. Milk is gone almost every morning, since Mikey and she are not alone, and so are the biscuits.

So she stretches next to her son, fully dressed. His small body presses into hers, like when he was less than a year old, protesting in his cot, until she would give in and take him to her bed where he would sleep more quietly than an angel. "My angel," she murmurs to a sleeping figure of the child before drifting off to sleep herself.

xxxxxxxxx

**Kelly's office, 20 June**

Kelly expects a forced social call from Michael any day now. She knows he has reached the limit of possible with his shovel, and he will have to provoke seeing her to try and obtain the key to the security system under the wall. She smiles evilly because the key is _not_ what he thinks, and even if he would be on the right track, which is unlikely, there is a safety mechanism in place if a code is broken by accident or the unnatural smartness of a person suffering from low latent inhibition. Soon Michael will know there is no way out through the wall. He will have to think of something else, and bring Roger with him too. In two more days, Roger will be locked up in the separated wing for patients being prepared for surgery. _Nothing, nothing can go wrong this time,_ Kelly thinks, and her inside gets all feverish from only considering that something might not go as she planned.

She is surprised when the call doesn't come that day, and even more profoundly so when a special postal delivery brings in a grand bouquet of yellow roses (most people hate them, but they are her favourite) among which her gun is sent back to her, a yellow ribbon tied gingerly around the barrel. The bullets have been taken out. Kelly throws the flowers immediately away and tucks the gun in her purse, after refilling it with ammunition, to return it to her car where it belongs to later on. She is so flabbergasted by Paul's gesture, even if it is over, _they are over,_ that she pays no attention to Sucre asking for a ride, nor to her morbid choice of music and singing along. She doesn't even check Sara's computer logs before leaving which she should do daily, to know for certain that the good doctor's knowledge has not overstepped from stumbling into secrets Kelly wants her to find out, into some real secrets of St Agatha which should be kept that way, hidden, for now.

She hums a classical piece of probably French music in Latin, from one of her personal collections, unaware of a former inmate scribbling the words she is mentioning on the palm of his hand. The mood of the tune she has chosen is strangely appropriate for her situation, especially if something in her perfect plan goes wrong and she is forced to harm herself. She wonders if Paul is between Sara's legs now and she fights the annoying mental image putting the music even louder.

**Kelly's office, 21 June**

Another bouquet of yellow roses is delivered on the next morning, with no weapons or ribbons to match. It almost ends in garbage like the previous one, but it is at that moment that Sara enters her office, way paler than usual. Kelly doesn't know to what she should attribute the change, and it doesn't look like a consequence of a good sex, which in itself is reassuring and flattering Kelly's shaken ego.

"Are you okay?" she asks with false worry, leaving the roses on the table for the time being.

"And if I wasn't?" Sara answers recklessly, black T-shirt, blue jeans, dressed as if she was going on vacation. As if she was _leaving._ "Would you try to drown me in the sink?"

So Paul has told her. It was to be expected.

"I don't know what he has told you when he was between your legs," Kelly comments rudely, ignoring the slap which lands sharply on her left cheek. It will bruise but she doesn't care. "It's not my fault that what we had did not work. Maybe it'll go better for the two of you."

"The only thing I wish," Sara says, sincerely, "is to get Paul off my couch. I rented a house, not a charity for stray animals."

Kelly chuckles as the words of her employee, pouring cold water over the waves of jealousy she still feels. At least now she can look at Sara again without wishing her to die on the spot or desiring to spill her brains open with one of her surgical knives. She reminds herself that the other women are not at fault when a man walks away, men are at fault too. It is a rationalisation, and it is true, yet it doesn't help as much as it should. Because it's so much easier to turn against the other woman than against the source of her problems. With the last name of Kellerman, and apparently polluting Sara's couch.

"I could help with that," Kelly suggests imagining Paul's face if she would walk into Sara's living, "but than you should invite me to your home."

"I will skip that if you don't mind." Sara says. "There is a simpler way. Montana isn't what I expected. Today I will gather my belongings and tomorrow I'll leave."

Kelly Davis gulps and tries hard to hide the shock at her worst assumptions being so bluntly confirmed. Sara leaving is not part of the plan at all and it should _not_ happen. If she leaves, Michael might lose his true even if subconscious source of motivation to break out. And, in passing, he could forget everything about Roger too. Michael's wife stares at her and Kelly knows she failed miserably to mask her surprise. "Hell," she curses, "I don't know what Paul Kellerman has told you about my profession, but I abandoned the military 10 years ago."

"The military?" Sara asks and Kelly realizes she had made a mistake, revealing a detail Sara was _not_ told.

There is no other way but to clear Sara's doubt but to offer a different version of the truth. Kelly is glad that so many varieties of the truth can peacefully coexist at most times.

"Both Paul and me had military training in our youth. My talents were elsewhere so through the military I could arrange a scholarship for the medical school, and Paul turned into agent business with Caroline Reynolds," she explains."My latest scientific project is performing experimental surgeries for terminal brain cancer patients."

"My patients know beforehand what are the odds," she continues. "Some live, and some don't. You are a doctor as well, you should be able to understand that much. I will let you see my research and the necessary permits of the federal authorities and the state of Montana. Paul and his friend, agent Mahone, have already had a good look. I'm sure that they omitted to inform you about that. I only advertise my side activity among other medical professionals treating patients with such diagnosis, not in newspapers. That way they can advise their patients on whether to contact me or not. I think it is only a fair thing to do."

It is not by half all the truth, not even close to it, but Kelly finally sees shadows of doubt overtaking the righteous fury in Sara's hazel eyes, and what she said should better work.

"Brain cancer?" is the only thing Sara is able to whisper. Her voice is cracking with emotion, barely audible. Kelly gets terribly afraid that she has just made another huge mistake, and that Sara will understand everything Kelly has done to Michael, by some supernatural telepathy among lovers who truly cared for each other, unlike Kelly and Paul.

"I'd like to see your research," Sara finishes lamely, her resistance broken, and Kelly Davis, a secret agent turned murderous and on the loose ten years ago, barely finds a strength to nod. She feels as if she has just crossed an abyss walking on the thin rope. She has to be _much_ more careful in the future. She should also check Sara's logs instead of getting busy with throwing flowers or sentimental about former lovers. Sara's leaving has nothing to do with what Paul said because it is obvious she didn't believe him at first. It has everything to do with the reported death of Mr Morris that could have been seen and double-checked in St Agatha's computing terminals the day before, if Sara looked for it on purpose.

Another bouquet of yellow roses is delivered precisely at that moment. Kelly leaves it on the table, touching it only briefly, as if it was a nest of snake and not a harmless gift. Then she looks up one of CDs with the summary of her legitimate medical research and hands it over to Sara.

"I didn't think Paul was the type to give flowers," Sara has the cheek to comment.

"Flowers won't get him anywhere," Kelly retorts dryly reliving the images of Paul on top of Michael's wife, which perhaps exist only in her mind. The temptation to kill Sara is replaced by an equally dangerous one of telling Michael who Sara is or simply leave him in her office long enough that he can escape with her. But that would ruin her life's work, and she will not allow it. "It's a little bit too late to woo me with plant life."

Sara relaxes a tiny bit and says, genuinely, "I think I know exactly what you mean."

Kelly thinks how Sara and her could be friends in another place, and in another time. They could go to toilet together if they went to the same high school and chat about good looking boys. It is not to be. They are on the opposing sides, and she can only hope she has done enough so that Sara will not run away from Montana just yet, as she has been running from everything since Michael was gone. She has to stay until Kelly's personal mission in St Agatha is over. By any means necessary.

xxxxxxx

**Michael's room, 21 June**

"Papi," the gardener comes under his window way before breakfast. "It was not easy. I don't know if I got it right."

"Yes?" Michael asks peering down. His room is many floors up from the ground level. The view is great but it is almost impossible to maintain a sensible conversation.

"It's a song for the dead, she told me," Sucre mutters nervously from below as if he was talking to himself, afraid of attendants who may start coming and going any minute when St Agatha wakes up again. He hits the ground with a shovel to pretend he is doing something even if no single plant grows on the concrete under Michael's window. "It sounds very powerful, many people were singing. It's old music, from Europe, I think. Very serious. From somebody called Foré, she said. I asked for the name but she replied so fast, and I couldn't ask again. The part she sang as well was about liberty, I think."

"Thanks, Sucre!" Michael howls down and retires from the window just on time because his breakfast is being brought in, not a second later than can be expected in an establishment functioning to a perfection like St Agatha. He gets tremendously impatient and anxious waiting for lunch time, which comes only several hours later. Then he should have enough time for the next step he has in mind. He has to fight the smells, the colours, the textures, every little detail of his already consumed breakfast and his too familiar room invading him all over again.

A minute after lunch is delivered and the attendant is out, his spoon is under the door and his body out of the view of the cameras watching him, if only partially. They can see a piece of him, but not exactly what he is doing. In another two minutes he is back in the watching room where only one woman is seated at the computer, the others gone for lunch break as he hoped.

"Hello," he says and the woman startles. He smiles at her, and she eases a bit. He must have a really nice smile to go with his eyes, because it is already the second time that the same trick works.

"How did you get out?" she asks, visibly altered by his presence.

 _Who am I, and what is it that can I do, that people are so afraid of me?_ he thinks, bitter. There is no answer. Or there is no easy answer at any rate.

"Was it locked?" he plays surprised. "I just opened the door. I wanted to get some air."

"Wait here," she tells him, predictably, walking two steps away from him, to the outer door of the watching room. He steps forward, playing innocent, but the advances of his not so tall but rather sturdy body and shoulders are decisive, and purposefully performed to look menacing. His smile has cooled down to a grimace.

As soon as the woman is out and he hears her passing her personal card on the outside, enclosing him safely in the watching room, Michael searches online for the most famous requiems that there are. He spots almost instantly the one written by someone called G. Fauré where the most popular part comes towards the end. It's something beginning with "Libera me". _That_ is excellent because it also corresponds to what Sucre thinks he heard with his Spanish mother tongue. Michael doesn't have time to dwell on the notion how he knows at all what Sucre's second mother tongue is, or that his conviction is of a decidedly personal nature, surpassing nationality stereotypes of all kinds about the gardener he barely knows. He is able to listen in relative peace to the over four minute long sequence of classical music he is interested in. The only other sound in the room being the too fast beating of his curious heart.

He commits it partially to memory and he is still able to delete the results of his browsing before the woman is back with the man who brought him lunch, strong steps pounding in the corridor. _The cavalry has come_ , he thinks, and laughs at the stupid metaphor. He follows his gaolers back to his room without discussion. They don't ask for an explanation and he is not offering them any. A bulge is prominent on one the right side of the man's white jacket. _A weapon,_ it has to be. Michael is very lucky, though. He had heard that particular piece of music Kelly likes in a life he doesn't remember, and he believes he was made to study the language it is sung in, _somewhat_ , at least, _at the university_ , maybe. He needs some time to think about it now and by the fall of the evening he should be ready.

He should.

When the time comes for his stroll in the garden, he pays attention to the door they are taking him through, for the first time. The spoon he stole after lunch, using the commotion of the people guarding him, will do for those too, if his luck holds.

If it holds.

It has to.

When he tries to go out, it has to be completely dark, and he has no idea what he will find on the outside. He has no idea what will happen to Roger if he breaks out and it pains him to leave him there, more than it should, for he doesn't know the man after all. They only share a common misery of being the guinea pigs in somebody else's hospital.

But Sara was sad and it is the first day of summer. He remembered that briefly during his frantic computer search, as he notices the weather, as he notices everything.

He needs to go to her.

He has to try.


	9. Going Under

**The wall, on Michael's side, 21 June at night**

Getting to the garden and avoiding night attendants ( _prison guards,_ he thinks (and doesn't quite know where the thought comes from) is a piece of cake. They were using a different way to take him out on a daily basis, probably on some higher orders to confuse him, but the variation was not enough. From many paths upon which he was made to walk, he laboriously constructed one correct way, the shortest one and the most efficient of all. The pattern is carefully recorded on napkins, purposefully and orderly torn apart (because he sees all that information in his surroundings but he just can't keep the most important one continuously on his mind, new data always fighting for a way into his consciousness).

He gets paper napkins for every meal they bring him and he saved his work in a garbage can they only empty once every four days if it doesn't stink. He made sure that it didn't. He feels in control and it makes him smile.

Opening the softened ground with the shovel comes easy too, his arms strengthened with continuous gardening and digging experiments in the past weeks since he woke up in St Agatha. It all runs smoothly until the sensors are before him and he has to think, playing the melody of De Faure's Requiem in his overburdened head. It has to be the first line, he is almost certain. _Free me, Lord, from eternal death..._ That was the line that Kelly was humming according to Sucre, and it is a beautiful line at that. Worthy of being remembered. _Who wouldn't wish for similar thing_ , he wonders. Michael would want that, so much is certain, just like Kelly Davis. _Maybe we have something in common,_ he thinks.

The sensors are first at the shovel's reach than at his hand reach. His hand is a much more refined instrument so he will use it to play the sensors quite literally, in hope he would not lose a finger or two in the process. Then one of his hands would match his toe lacking foot, but the idea doesn't make him happy at all, quite on the contrary. He gently presses the sensors in intervals corresponding to _Libera me, domine_ from de Faure. The grid is switched off, judging by a calm harmonious beep. Joy at outsmarting Kelly booms within him, when the system unexpectedly goes online again in two minutes. Luckily he waited for that long, as a sign of precaution, not knowing where he found the patience. Maybe in the fact that no one is waiting for him. No one will ever be waiting for him if little what Kelly told him about him is true. Michael is, or can be, a very dangerous man.

Two minutes is nowhere near enough to go under the wall. So there is a safety catch after the musical key which he rightfully guessed, and he has no idea what it is. He tries pressing the sensors in the intervals which correspond to the other verses of the song for the souls of the dead. None of them shuts down the system, but one makes it go all haywire, earth flashing red, and it can luckily be stopped by pressing the initial Free me, my lord sequence once again in an extremely slow motion. Michael's fingers shake when he establishes that, and also how close he was to getting hurt (again), probably to end up on Kelly's surgical table or worse.

It is in vain. He is inadequate and he failed. Or maybe it's because he was a bad man so he is now being punished. He believes that he believes in god, now and before, but he doesn't believe that the god he believes in would punish him in such a way. So there has to be another explanation.

Michael didn't take Roger with him although there has to be a way to liberate them both. _From death everlasting and governmental experiments with the helpless._ An inner voice whispers a warning to him: Roger doesn't look helpless. If anything, he looks more dangerous than Michael can see himself in the mirror every morning, Kelly Davis insinuations about Michael notwithstanding. Yet Michael's feelings go to the older man so strongly that he chooses to trust those gut sensations. There is little else one can rely on, especially when the implacable logic of his exquisitely detailed mind fails to provide further ideas on how to break out immediately from St Agatha's by going under the wall.

At least until an image of Sara about to collapse from sadness returns to him. Then he sings the entire _Libera me, domine_ part of the Requiem in his head, looking for a phrase he hasn't used, in full knowledge that he _had_ used all of them. So the only logical conclusion is that there is another completely unrelated sequence required to fully override the system, and he has no clue what it could be. Kelly Davies is _smarter_ than he thought. Objectively, he has no grounds to be certain either if that's a good or a bad thing.

His sense of urgency grows when he believes he catches a whiff of Sara's perfume through the wall between them. It gives him another precious information: if his nose is not playing tricks on him (and he strongly believes it is not the case), the wall is less thick than he assumed, or what it looks when spying from above, the dimensions being distorted by the distance. The masters of St Agatha are confident that the sensor protection is safer than thickness and, therefore, more than enough. Not from Michael, it isn't. His lips curl upwards in a mischievous smile, and it is time to test the new hypothesis.

"Hello," he says shyly towards the minuscule opening, hoping she is there. His capacity to plan and execute comes to a temporary outage when he considers fully who might be on the other side of the wall. The omnipotent smile freezes and dies on his lips. Because the woman he imagines and wishesto be there for him is so painfully perfect, and may not want anything to do with someone she knows to be a lunatic runaway from a respectable psychiatric institution.

For the longest of moments, there is no answer.

Michael's world starts spinning, and he almost expects that the ground will open and close to swallow him in his despair.

Xxxxxx

**Sara, that same night, starting a little bit earlier**

Yes, she still works in the psychiatric clinic in Montana, despite her earlier determination to leave, not a day earlier. _Not in Blackfoot, never there, but not far either._ The local school little Mikey goes to is not a very good quality one, but there's no bullying and the local kids are nice. He even seems to be having a real _friend._ The teachers and the parents don't watch much TV so there are no too many questions asked.

It is better that way.

One more reason to stay: the clinic pays a fairly decent amount to a former inmate and a widow of one of the most famous fugitives of all times. Sara Tancredi, the governor's daughter, didn't need to work. Sara Scofield, on the contrary, she needs a job.

She knows she is not supposed to go to the wall, because the man she imagines behind it will most likely be sleeping in his room so late at night. And she should find her strength to go on and to cope within, and not place such demands on others. She has learned that long ago when she forced herself to stop using. There is no other way.

Until that night, the first one of summer, she goes to a specific wall of St Agatha again, drawn by an urge she can only begin to grasp.

She dropped Mikey at Esperança's and Adelaide's home: a small white house with an impeccable garden of grass, pink hydrangeas and tiny white roses. It looked safe enough or as safe as it can ever be for her son. People might come after him when he is bigger, believing, wrongly or not, he possesses his father's talents. It's the first time he sleeps away from home and it won't be the last time. Sara was totally unable to return to an empty home by herself. She would be unable even if Kellerman was not abusing her couch. So she returned and she stayed in her office at the clinic well into the night, doing things of no consequence, not eager at all to discover there were more Mr Morrises killed, or any other irregularities in the St Agatha's.

It is June and the smell of the tree blossoms poisons the air and the mind, so she walks to that wall like a sleepwalker despite that she should not. She goes to the edge where it touches the low fence leading to the gate of her part of the clinic, then she returns to the place a bit backwards where she knows the opening must be.

She goes and she hears it instantly, a subtle knocking, a fading sound.

Conveniently, almost at her height.

There is a small hole in the wall, or there isn't, it's too dark to see. But the sound is there so she presses her ear to the hard surface and listens, with utmost care.

"Hello," a voice says and her heart is in her throat, because she most definitely doesn't hear Michael's voice.

It is impossible.

It's been a long time since she stopped taking medicines to stop hearing him in her dreams and in her woken state. She is whole, grown up, steady, clean. She is alone.

"Hello," a voice repeats and she replies, automatically. "Hello there," she says. Whoever it is, it doesn't hurt to give in to imagination, just this once.

"Doctor? Is that you?" the voice asks her, and the innocent way he pronounces her title breaks her heart. "I thought I would be all alone in my section of the garden at this hour. It's been driving me insane."

 _It's okay,_ she knows. _It's not Michael._ _It can't be._ It's just a patient from the incurable ward which is not even supposed to exist and who doesn't know her. Still, she finds that talking to someone whose voice is so similar, and imagining things were different doesn't hurt. Just this once.

"Well, actually, I'm also alone, just in another part of the same garden," she says and blinks away the unwanted tears.

"It's summer," the whisper comes through the hole, and she wishes to climb over the wall and see him. She knows her desire is hopeless: the wall is too high, the stones it is made of are polished and smooth.

And even if it wasn't, scaling it would not do the trick at all. For the wall looks ancient and mossy, made of large blocks of stone, but its top is secured with the state of the art wiring starting a complex alarm system and electrocuting the intruder. Not fatally, but enough to get caught. To lose a job she so badly needs.

"It is," she agrees with him about the season.

"Tell me how it looks, summer..." he commands her, as if he had never known one. For some reason she hurts from understanding that.

"Well, it's green, and people stay out late, and talk, and play stupid ball games."

"It sounds as the summer should be," he gives a laugh, and her heart constricts even more.

"I guess so," she manages to stutter back.

"Hey," he says and she is unable to answer. Only to smell the blossoms and weep from the beauty of the night. Like crazy. She will take something to get better as soon as she is back home and forgets everything about the encounter. Mikey cannot see her like that.

"Hey," he repeats, "will you come again tomorrow? We can do a picnic! I could come down to you, through a hole."

 _The hole,_ she thinks and giggles nervously, for it sounds exactly like something Michael would have done. He would have found a place to run away from any enclosure, from any prison, state of the art or not.

"Okay," she says, defeated.

"Don't forget, please," he says. "It's a deal."

xxxxxxx

**Sara, the night after the first conversation through the wall**

The next evening she asks the baby sitter to come at night. She reads a bedtime story to Mikey and drives back to the clinic carrying a picnic basket. All thoughts about leaving Montana are gone from her head, as if they had never occurred to her. As if Mr Morris was still alive. Mikey doesn't ask her about their departure, omitting on purpose the conversation they agreed to have, and she doesn't press the matter further.

She drives and she knows that nothing is going to cut it out for her because she is not meeting Michael.

But Sara is driving anyway.

She is meeting an illusion of Michael, and it makes her so happy that it hurts.

She tells a lie to a night guard wondering where it came from, something much more convincing than before, when she had to sneak in to the places she worked to get the stuff she'd been using. She forgets the content of the lie instantly.

The wall is there, but there is no sound, only silence. Maybe a cheese sandwich could help her, so she sits in the freshly mowed grass and eats with an appetite of a teenager. An orange juice after midnight also tastes way better than she remembers it.

There are candles, but lighting them is maybe not the best idea. The guard could see her, and recommend to the administration that she belongs with the patients, rather than with the doctors of the institution. Especially if the specialist in anaesthesiology posing as a security guard has a night duty.

She stands up and touches the cold wall with her fingers, but there is no hole, no sound. It must have been a summer hallucination of her mind. It would be the first time she has experienced something like that, but then again, there's mostly a first time for everything.

But the night is even more beautiful than the previous one, and she doesn't want to go home. So she eats some more and the basket is almost empty. She lays in the warm grass and looks at the stars, cruel and far away.

She falls asleep, she is not sure for how long, and when she wakes up, she is laying in dew, a fear creeping over her.

She is not alone. The ground is too soft on her left side, freshly tilled.

A voice says, on _her_ side of the wall, in unfeigned amazement: "You are here. I thought that you wouldn't come. They told me no one would ever come for me from the outside world."

She is not afraid and she looks for the candle. She doesn't care about the guard any longer.

"Who told you that?" she asks nervously, grabbing the matches.

"The doctors, the people," he comments. "They haven't really told me in so many words, but it was somehow implied that I had no one. So I stayed there, where I was. I had nowhere else to go. Until I started seeing you from afar, and last night I felt your scent."

The small flame is alight and his face is closer than ever. Tears blur her vision and her lips tremble.

"You are beautiful!" he says as if he sees her for the first time in her life and whatever they did to him it's obvious that he has no idea who she is. Nor who he is, most probably.

"Hello," she says, shyly, "do you want to go for a ride?"

"Why not?" he smiles _that_ smile of his from the Fox River with which he could get anything he wanted from anyone he graced with it, and Sara is happier than she has ever been.

"Let's just," she says, stamping on the soft ground, "cover this up."

"Don't worry," he says, "it's all planned. The tunnel collapsed on the other side. I patched the hole when I finished the tunnel tonight. They will never figure it out. They'll think I disappeared in smoke."

And as she takes him to her car under the cover of darkness, she believes him.

They don't pass by the guard, they go to her office and jump out of the window from the first floor, avoiding the eye of the single camera she knows there is, in the corridor on their way. They are immediately out of the walls of St Agatha, all of them, legal or not.

He kisses her on the back seat of the car as if they were both students.

She lets him, and it is at the same time familiar and completely new, his _need_ for her the only constant element. Her own need for him is terrible, but she will not let it advance any further, so close to the place they are running from and when he is so clearly not in his right mind. She kisses him back than, surprising him with the way she is able to consume him. She used to do it before and it never failed her. Michael holds on to her tiny waste and embraces her helplessly, closing his eyes from the sensation, for the first time since they have seen each other, again, in her case, and in his case, she doesn't know. He might well believe that they have only just met.

All the time while she is kissing him, she cannot stop thinking about where they will go from there, where it will be safe now for Mikey, and who will come after them.

It never ends.

But she would not have it any other way.

Then, his hands are on her breasts and he is returning her the favour. He is in control now, and she is being used by him. For some reason, this normally irritating thought doesn't upset her as much as it should. The upper part of her body gets unburdened, and if she doesn't stop that and start driving, the rest will follow too soon. They are too close to the clinic, and they could be seen, (but that thought only makes what they are about to do more desirable so it is best avoided).

"Sara," he whispers, and then she makes a mistake. Or maybe she saves them from being captured and murdered, she will never know.

"Michael," she finally calls him by his name, and the beauty of the evening stops.

"How do you know my name?" he asks with a new something in his voice, a lack of faith, a concern. He doesn't trust her any more. She can see that behind his wrinkled brow he must be weighing the possibilities, almost as if she truly worked with the masters of St Agatha, or whoever had saved him from a deadly explosion and brain cancer five years ago only to use him for his or her end.

"Michael," she says again, her body cooling down, missing tremendously the closeness they shared only moments ago. "We have met before. Before you came to St Agatha. Please, believe me, I have no idea you were here. Or I would... I would... I don't know what I would have done, but I would have never left you in that enclosure."

"What were we, before?" he dares asking, eyes cold and pleading for answer at the same time. "Was I... was I a criminal?"

The first drops of summer rain tap gently at the windows of the car, urging them to go. At her home there is a bed. There would be a couch as well, but she thinks that just like they left St Agatha through the back window, they might be forced to get into her home through the back door in total silence, not to wake up sleeping children and baby sitters, or unwelcome guests.

"People thought you were," she answers him honestly. "And you were many things when I knew you, but you have committed no true crime."

"Do you... Do you..." Michael's voice gets swallowed by the rain getting stronger, and she knows that it costs him to say what he is saying then.

"Do you still want to know me?" he asks.

She silences him with another kiss he never saw coming, her breasts pressing to his chest, in search for proximity denied by his sweatshirt, the fabric of which is as harsh as if it was produced and distributed in Fox River. There is even dust on her body now from where he came from, from under the wall. It feels as if he very literally returned from the dead, the way his body has come out of the ground while she was asleep.

"You are beautiful," he repeats when they stop the kiss, and part for only an inch, a few fingers of his tenderly caressing her cheek.

"Come home with me," she breathes out an invitation.

"I would ask you if I can take you _home_ if I had one," he jokes with her then. "Or if I knew where my home was," he finishes his thought lamely, and she laughs, ignoring her body aching for them to continue where they so inconveniently stopped. They disentangle and she walks out of the car only to enter it in front. There, she grasps the steering wheel with two hands, and with passion that doesn't belong to driving. It is by sheer luck they arrive safely to the city, avoiding the ravines down the road, because her mind is not set on making the car go forward.

Her mind is set on a man dirty from crawling in the underground tunnels, the handsome tortured man who is drowsing peacefully on the back seat of her old spacious car.

She wonders if he will be able to tell her at all what has happened to him. Many things could have changed in five years.

Above all, she dreads his reaction _after_ she gathers enough strength to confess to him that he is ( _or was?_ ) her husband. He is technically still her husband, at any rate, no one can deny that. The paper she still has somewhere at home is clear enough about the letter of the law. Sara couldn't very well handle Michael's death, but it was still better than never meeting him at all. And there is only one thing a thousand times worse which could still happen.

If Michael is alive and doesn't want anything to do with her.

"Come," she calls him out when she parks the car in her own yard, leading a half sleeping man to her back door. His arm sneaks around her waist, his head gets buried on her shoulder and she feels wanted beyond measure.

"Sara" he breathes in, "can I... get to know you again?"

"You've already started, haven't you" she murmurs as the door gives in to her key, and they are in the dark corridor.

"Please," he says as she guides him to her bedroom without switching on the light and she can almost touch his growing need to be more specific about his desires.

"Be mine," he spells it out.

She has been his for a long time.

She undresses fully instead of giving him an answer while he stumbles in a chair and watches her do with fascination, from a short distance.

His gaze is devoted, devoid of any glint of ruse or superiority which almost never left the Michael she knew and married. It makes her see two things: Michael truly has no idea who he is or who she is.

Yet he seems to want her stronger than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and in particular to two guests who have left a kudos.


	10. The Overdose

**Kelly's Home**

It's never particularly good when your phone rings at 5am.

Kelly learned that in her early days in the army when there was only one phone on the floor for the whole bunch of would be new soldiers. Now everyone has a private cell phone, and it goes off at the least opportune moment. Such as when you are dreaming of a large family you will never start, and also a bit about how the guy you fucked in the woods a few days ago is bringing you breakfast in bed.

"I see," she says on the phone, her not so pale face losing the healthy tanned color it normally has. Her still black hair would get white from the sensation as well if that was possible at all. "I will be there shortly."

First she goes to her daughter's room to see her sleeping. Because maybe she will not get home in the evening and Adelaide may become an orphan again if Kelly's plan B doesn't work. At least she has a trust fund to see her through all her schooling, including a decent university. Be as it may, Kelly always dreamt to be there for her in person. Just to forget the way no one was ever there for Kelly when she was a teenager and later on a young woman. Well, Paul tried to be there but she didn't quite let him. It's also her fault, she knows. Shooting him in the head may have been slightly too much to do. Everyone would have left her after _that._

Adelaide's dark skin and dark hair look terribly innocent on a pillow with large pink flowers, in a room so child-friendly that Kelly has to weep, only so little, when she is standing and looking at her daughter.

 _Maybe all will be well,_ she thinks and doesn't dare to hope. _I got out of tough situations before._

**St Agatha's garden, the spot where Michael got out of the clinic**

The female attendant who had been watching Michael from the control room is even paler than Kelly has become since her phone had rung.

"He _has_ been here," the woman ( _Ms Clarke?_ Kelly is not certain) states matter of factly. "There are enough traces of that. But then he vanished into thin air. The security system is intact in the ground. There is nothing on the upper part of the wall to indicate that he climbed over. There are no tools he could have used for going either over or under the wall that we recovered."

"Intact, is it?" Kelly says staring at the ground. The grass is uneven but it has been that way for days. Summer is not merciful and even with regular watering the grass is not as green as it should be. And a dozen patients in the closed ward use it for their daily walk, not only Michael.

There has to be a logical answer. There mostly is one. Kelly leaves the closed part of the clinic wondering how she is going to explain to Ralph ( _Roger, damn it!_ ) that his ticket out of St Agatha's has just gone away on his own. It is against everything they have foreseen or planned. _Brilliant. Unique._ All the reasons why she invested so much time and effort in Michael, never dreaming that it could turn against them as it did. Breaking out of _St Agatha_ is supposed to be impossible. The institute is much more impregnable than Fox River ever was. So Roger and Kelly believed they were smart enough; they _would_ know which way he was going to choose before he would eventually make it. _With Roger. Never in a million years without him._ Michael and Roger have two sharp unconventional minds. They could beat St Agatha together, with minimum help fromKelly: who is supposed not to let Roger leave, to satisfy the men who sign her state pay roll. She purposefully allowed the meticulous crafting of the hole in the wall so that Michael could see Sara from nearby and be motivated to leave, but she never expected he would actually succeed in doing that on his own and so early. _Very_ s _hort-sighted thinking, Kelly, almost as dumb as it can get._ She blames herself for it, but there's only so much she can now do.

Trouble hit them on the very day that Roger is being transferred to the area where patients from the closed ward are prepared for the surgery. His odds of surviving it are very low, with his age and true medical history, not recorded in the clinic's archive. And the only way in which Roger doesn't have to undergo the procedure is if the only person capable of performing it, Kelly Davis, gets out of the picture. And if she wants to lay her hands on those plans he intends to sell to the Koreans, she has to play that game.

It might be easier to talk to Ralph ( _No, Roger!_ She screams in her mind) if she could at least reconstruct what happened. She runs to the other side of the wall, on the public side of the clinic, counts the bricks to come to the exact place where Michael must have been standing, on the non existing side of St Agatha. She regrets not suffering from low latent inhibition herself and recounts the stones, unable to spot the hole she ordered or any difference in the wall to pinpoint the exact spot. Only then she remembers Michael had a shovel, and the shovel is missing, too.

She examines the ground next to the bottom of the wall, and she finally finds it. The ground just so soft that it could not have been that way for very long. The soil is malleable, but compact. There is no tunnel, no visible passage.

A few minutes later, Kelly slams the door of her office behind her, pours herself a glass of old whisky for breakfast and sits down to think. The burning feeling in her throat is almost enough for her to loose composure and get sick. She doesn't. She is stronger than that.

She puts some music to think easier, and unwillingly, her favorite Requiem starts playing. Her personal security code. After the second glass of whisky, the burning in an empty stomach diminishes, and a Portorican face comes to mind. She realizes just how stupid she was. She was so unstable after having sex with Paul that she listened to de Faure's piece in the car. Precisely when Michael's cellmate from Fox River, and probably best friend, whom she let close enough to Michael on purpose so that he could recognise him, all of a sudden hitch-hiked a ride.

Michael must have figured there was a musical code. Which was supposed to be impossible, or so she was told by the guys from Pentagon who designed it. Then instead of trying to get it out of Kelly himself, he had set her up with Sucre. He thought it was going to be that easy and soon he must have understood it was not. He did discover the safety mechanism of the musical code, the sequence which would make the tunnel collapse and the person in die, the combination even her attendants knew nothing about. Kelly didn't trust her hand-picked staff with _all_ sensitivesecurity information. Everything on a need to know basis, and nothing more than that. The only thing he didn't decrypt was the personal code confirming the main musical code and switching the system definitely off. Because to know that you had to know Kelly personally. And you had to know that only one name ever did the trick to ruin most of her plans.

A four letter key, not a musical one.

_P. A. U. L._

So far, so good, and fool proof as it should have been.

Except that then Michael thought of a third option, the one Kelly never considered but which had been there, lurking in the shadows all the time.

He typed the sequence to shut down the system and dug the tunnel as far as he could before the alarm would go off. Than he would return and switch it off. He repeated that until he was almost under the wall and on the other side. It must have taken two long and painfully slow evenings of digging to complete the task. Kelly still can't quite understand how he could determine with certainty that the width of the wall was less than it appeared: because the hole through which he could peer on Sara was purposefully distorted by a special building technique, so that the wall would seem thicker than it actually was.

One way or another, Michael established how thin the wall really was.

And before digging the final part of it, which would be just too long to finish and return, in the two minutes that the system was off, just like she planned in case he would make it that far, the last time he didn't return all the way. He returned only half the way to introduce the code for the safety mechanism, knowing it would destruct the passage.

He did it from within the tunnel, as far towards the exit as possible. He marked the sequence with the end of the shovel, and than he speedily crawled all the way through it, until he got out, just before the entire passage collapsed behind him, as if it had never existed...

 _Michael is smarter than I thought_ , Kelly realizes with aggressive certainty as what he had done unravels painstakingly in her mind. _We should have found someone else._

But there is no one else in her extensive studying of people who managed to run away from prisons who would be half as intelligent as Michael.

She opens her personal medical closet and takes out a small bag with white powder, a spoon, and a fresh needle. She'll need a few other items from her drawers, a source of heat, and a string to squeeze her arm. She can fetch those later. It's not what Sara had been using, but it will do.

Kelly has never been using herself, and she doesn't know exactly how to do it. She knows it theoretically. It's the cleanest way, attempted suicide. When she recovers, she should be able to work again, but perhaps she can argue that she is incapable to perform the procedure on Roger for months. Hands shaking and all that.

Than he can go on living in St Agatha's until she finds someone else to assume Michael's role.

She looks at the heroine on her desk and doesn't think of Michael, or of Paul. She thinks of Adelaide and of the small but not entirely negligible possibility that she screws all this up and dies. If she does, so will the plans for the nuclear development of North Korea and Roger, probably in prison. She doesn't want to die. The intelligence she seeks be damned, she only wants to wake up when she is done with it, and see her adoptive daughter again.

Michael has run away, and there is only one way out of her situation for Kelly Davis.

She has to overdose.

xxxxxx

**Washington DC In front of an inconspicuous government building**

"What are we even doing here?" Lincoln asks impatiently and Mahone doesn't know what to answer. So he says: "Keep quiet. We're waiting for a friend of mine." But that is not the entire answer. Nowhere near such thing.

The place where they came is the archive of the federal police where some classified data on staff can be accessed. On former intelligence officers who served with the FBI after their career in state security services or military was over. On agents gone rogue. On police officers, agents and former military or intelligence personnel turning rogue and going into lucrative criminal activity.

It's all because the level of security clearance Kelly Davis enjoys was so painfully visible in Mahone's fruitless search for something wrong in her hospital. It's something Mahone could not and still can't understand. His detective instinct was triggered by it and he will not rest until he has all the answers at hand. He is afraid of one other possibility regarding Kellerman's former girlfriend, that could be fatal for Sara, and that the former paid executioner didn't think about.

It is entirely possible that Kelly Davis is such a successful criminal that her file is not accessible through normal search of any federal database Mahone can perform with his rather high clearance levels because she is still an active officer of the state security. And a high profile one at that. The archive they are standing in may show that, but his friend can only get them so far by typing the codes which allow them to enter the secured room. The rest they will have to do themselves, and it is a serious federal offence if they are caught consulting the classified data.

"The woman is a crazy former military officer, all right?" Lincoln asks. "Shouldn't we be back in Montana getting Sara out of there instead of digging for more stuff of what we already know.

"It's what we don't know that scares the hell out of me," Mahone mutters. "You have to _know_ your enemy."

The building looks so usual and so does Mahone's friend who lets them in the antechamber of the archive. Lincoln forces the special lock on the closet where hard disks to log on the system are stored with expert precision and no sound, for which Mahone is grateful. This is why Michael's brute brother is on that mission to start with. There are no paper files in the room, only a computer linked to every security service in the country except the Oval Office, once you insert the adequate hard disk.

Mahone beams as he enters the system and starts the search on Kelly Davis. Hours later, both Mahone and Lincoln are bending their heads in quiet desperation.

The search on Kelly Davis in the secret FBI archives gives the same result as the one in public prosecution and police records. She is clean. Innocent as a flower after leaving the army. There is no recollection of her doing anything wrong whatsoever.

"It's impossible," Mahone sighs, "some things Kellerman knew and mentioned would have to be here, and they are not. And there is no easy way fo these records to be tampered with."

"Maybe Kellerman doesn't know that much about Kelly," Lincoln's conclusion is simple and correct as usual. "Maybe she's a good girl."

Mahone trembles with terrible certainty. There is one more possibility. To check it out they have to break into the archive of the Oval Office, no less.

"Maybe" Mahone agrees and thinks on what he can say to convince Lincoln to do that final step.

xxxxxx

**Sara's bedroom**

Michael wakes up way before dawn in the place which is not St Agatha after what must have been only a few hours of blessed sleep. Coppery hair sits on his face and soft body is curled next to his. There is nothing between them. There is only a thin sheet above them, and there is a trail of pale light passing under the door, and coming in shyly through the window.

He is in bed with Sara, and she knows his name.

She _undressed_ for him. They kissed, he touched her all over and she touched him back. Then they slept because he lacked courage to take things any further. But in the morning his body demands its share and she is entirely too beautiful to be left to sleep.

"Sara" he calls her softly.

"Michael," she replies, not quite awake, "this is not real."

"It is," he says in a voice full of emotion, "we're real."

When he finishes the sentence, he knows he had said it to her once before.

It has an effect on her. Long hands are around his neck, then going down his muscular arms, sneaking on his body. His hands are lost on her back and the welcoming warmth is more than he can handle.

The longing for her is in his mind and in his body, it has been there for weeks since he woke up in St Agatha. What they are about to share is too much too hope for, yet it is as unavoidable as waking up and falling back to sleep.

"You don't know who I am, or what I did..." he tries to say.

She smiles at him, her lips over his, her hands guiding his to where she wants them, showing him it is okay, it is what she wants as well.

There is no time for second thoughts and they have all the time in the world.

When they are finally done, there is a little bit more light in the room, but it's still very early in the morning.

His back is pressed against the pillow and she is examining the clumsy drawings on his arms with an almost religious zeal, a small smile never leaving her lips.

"St Agatha?" she asks.

"The blueprints of my side of it, leading to yours. As much as I could figure," he confirms.

She says it before he does as if she can read his mind. "You have to go back."

He stares at her attentively: "There's something I need to do over there. Save a man, maybe. Get some answers about myself. It's just that I don't know exactly what it is. Doesn't it sound crazy?"

"It does," she agrees.

And he spills it all out, how he woke up in St Agatha's, his conversations with Kelly, with Roger, the things going on in the clinic he is not sure about.

"You will never be at peace if you don't go back," she concludes in an even voice. She speaks with calm she is not feeling, he can sense it by the way her body tenses in his arms, yet she succeeds in doing it anyway.

Michael shakes his head admiring the level of understanding she has for him.

"But if you go back, you are not sure at all that you can get out again, unless... Except... the way Mr Morris did," she spells that out as well, and her eyes narrow, dangerously close to crying.

"I got out once," he says, allowing a tiny bit of arrogance to show. "I'll get out once again."

To that, she is crying and smiling at the same time. She holds him tightly, too tight for his liking and her tears wet his neck but it is something so precious that he would never break contact until she finally does.

"I will help you," she says.

"Why?" he asks like a boy, overly eager to know the answer to a question his parents have been avoiding for months.

"Because if I don't, you'll do it anyway. And I wish to believe that if I do you've got a bigger chance to survive."

To that, Michael can only grin and tighten his grip on her in return.

"It's you who makes me wish to live," he says and he's very serious about it.

It's the most he can give her now.

xxxxxxxx

**Kelly's private office, St Agatha**

A long search in the premises gave no results as she expected. She is certain her interpretation of how Michal got away is the correct one, but she will not share it with anyone. She should tell Roger, but she's getting way too depressed to do that and she decides against it on a whim. He will know soon enough what has happened. She knows he has eyes and ears among the attendants spying on her as well. So far they haven't uncovered anything important, nothing to tell him Kelly was after the plans herself. She can at least smile when she thinks of that even if in the end she screwed up. Badly. Misjudged. Tremendously. And now she has to suffer the consequences.

She looks at the drug on her desk and thinks.

It is entirely inappropriate to overdose at 10 am.

At night, the same could have a bigger aura of tragedy, a dramatic appeal of a life ending for all the wrong reasons, fit for a sappy TV story. A plot for a bad novel. A relatively young woman who should have lived much longer, who could have had more children. Children of her own body to be brothers and sisters to Adelaide. Or who could have adopted more children with her extremely high surgeon earnings if society and biology would not cooperate to give her children of her own. A waste of a life that held so much promise.

She'd rather shoot herself in the head too. As she did with Paul. But there is no one competent enough whom she _trusts_ to rearrange her brain tissue after that, as she had fixed both Paul and Michael. Except that Paul has no idea about it. He still believes he owes his life to the unnamed doctor of the LA emergency services in one of the best LA hospitals. She forgot the name of the establishment, and she never liked it too much. There were too many celebrities improving their facial features walking around when she kicked out the guy who was about to try and save Paul's life, and then she did his job instead. That's what the government badge can give you: credentials, authority to override decisions. But not high enough to be trusted to break Roger out of prison herself and get those plans from him in the process. She proposed it to her bosses but she couldn't obtain their approval. _I wouldn't give it to myself either,_ she thinks. _Not with my CV I wouldn't,_

The CV of working mainly for herself, and for no one else. The reason why Roger trusts her, and her bosses don't.

And the ideal person she found to do this little extra job of freeing Roger for her has just turned around and left: all psychological explanations of how to manipulate people to do what you want them to do be damned.

She looks at the heroine on the table and is happy about one thing. If she makes it, and she prays to God she does, she will be out for long. And she might end up slightly ruined in body. Or she can appear to be that way. Not enough to stop her from working, never that. Being a surgeon is her life.

Just enough to stop Ralph from wanting her. Ralph who only wants slim and fit female types Kelly Davis has been so far.

It would be easier that way.

Preparation goes easy and she is about to inject herself when the office phone beeps.

It's the secretary on the outside. Kelly nearly chooses to ignore it, but then she doesn't, the years of training to obey orders and follow proper procedures kicking in.

And maybe it saves her life.

"Ms Davis," the woman speaks, clearly nervous. "Doctor Scofield has just reported an incident."

"Yes?" Kelly asks with curiosity, sleeve on her doctor coat still rolled up.

"She was a bit late for work today and she has found a patient she has never seen sleeping at her desk."

"Who is it?" Kelly asks and her usually unwavering voice looses all consistency.

"He is not really registered in this clinic, Madam, despite wearing our uniform, it is most strange."

"How does he look?"

"Young, very short hair, your age maybe, I don't know..."

"Tell doctor Scofield I'll be right there."

"Shall I send in the security?"

"No need," Kelly refuses. "I'll let you know later on what should be done."

"Okay, madam," the secretary hangs up, audibly relieved.

Kelly discards the heroine and other equipment she used in the closet, locks it up, masks the door to her private storage of dangerous chemicals to the state of medical and mechanical perfection. Just the way she likes it. Not even Paul and Mahone were able to find it. She will dispose of it later and replace it with the new portion of the drug for a later occasion, if necessary. She is not in hurry, not in the least. Because she has been to Sara's office in person at 6 am, and the disguised military personnel of the clinic has already searched every corner of St Agatha before 8 am.

If Michael is in Sara's office now, there is only one explanation for it.

He has broken out, he has somehow gone to her, and he has decided to come back.

Of his own free will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and leaving kudos


	11. Back to the Starting Point

Kelly enters Sara Scofield's office in her clinic with utmost care, afraid of what she is going to find. The scene she faces is calm, almost unusual. It is so much in order that what she sees can only be totally out of order. It is a highly extraordinary situation in her meticulously planned world, and she is terribly unsure what to do.

Michael Scofield is seated on a patient cot in the doctor's office, and she is at her desk, calmly examining her morning e-mails as if the man in front of her is not her husband whom she had thought dead for 5 years.

He looks at her with friendly acceptance and nothing more, and from what little Kelly could find out from the staff she talked to in Fox River, the gazes between the two were tense, the chemistry electric, before they have ever overstepped the border between the doctor and patient and worse, prison doctor and inmate.

What is worse, they are not accusing her of anything, and by now, both should have many ideas about at least some of her most flagrant transgressions. Enough not to trust her at all.

"Good morning," Sara says very casually, continuing her routine morning work.

"Good morning, Ms Davis," Michael parrots, the blue and green eyes flashing at Kelly only so briefly. _I know,_ they say. _And I know that you know._

They don't give her anything else, so she has to play along, there is nothing she can do for the moment.

"Michael," she says to have it recorded on the cameras, "I suppose it is futile to ask in your delicate condition, but how did you arrive over here?"

"Just walked, I guess" he shrugs. "The doors were open. I was too hot in my room and there were no attendants at night to complain to them. I thought I could just as well see the doctor here if one of them was doing the night shift. I really didn't feel that good to wait until the morning."

He is lying and Kelly knows it, yet she has to put up with it, to see what he is hinting at.

"Doctor?" she asks Sara in a most professional tone she can produce in her current state of mind. "Is there anything wrong with the patient? Did he trouble you after his night walk when you arrived this morning?"

"Is there anything wrong with _Michael_? Perhaps you could tell me," Sara asks back with cold flat expression, the only accusation she permits herself to pronounce. "As I remember you are a physician as well. I could use a second opinion."

Kelly responds carefully: "In the past, like five years ago to be more precise, he was hit by an explosion which has nearly caused some brain damage. It was all sorted out by a complex surgery. He remained in the vegetative state but his vital functions were stable. Then, as the doctors who treated him expected, one day he woke up."

Kelly omits her role in the case, she doesn't say it was her who operated Michael, she doesn't say it was her who saved his life. She doesn't say it was her, corrupted or not, who realized, looking for a candidate to help with this entire business with Roger, that the Company, still very much alive and kicking at the time, placed false blood work results for Michael Scofield in the entire network of public laboratories in all the states of the US where it was known he resided or passed through. So that any blood work of his would tell him he had cancer again. And kill any hope he had to survive the Company and its General. Michael Scofield's cancer has never returned. He had been healthier than most men of his age when he sacrificed himself so that Sara can run away from prison. Kelly only had to patch his head injury from the explosion. There was no brain cancer to treat. Perhaps she could have treated him for that as well, but she is glad she didn't have to try. Other doctors fixed his minor injuries when she was done with his head.

"I could have his full medical records transferred to you," is the only information Kelly still offers to his wife.

"Could you? That would be great," Sara comments, and they both know she doesn't believe Kelly, not for a bit. Just like Kelly will never be able to cede to her all of her husband's medical records. They would reveal far too much of Kelly's personal and the government's plan with her husband.

"Sure," Kelly nods and goes back to business. "Now, if you don't mind, the attendants will take Mr Scofield back to his room."

"Not at all," Sara says, "as long as he returns for a check up, let's say on a weekly basis? I have not made my professional opinion yet."

"I'm afraid that is not possible in the wing he resides in," Kelly says with cheek, admitting the secret business of St Agatha in a few words. "He is technically not part of our programme to help people with psychological troubles for which you are working, but of another programme to treat persons suffering from severe mental disorders that I am also in charge of. You have to understand the privacy of such matters: the patients in question prefer to keep their condition and the chosen form of treatment a secret."

"Like Mr Morris?" Michael matches Kelly's insolence with his own, with perfect calm and slight irony.

"Like Mr Morris," Kelly has to agree, and her voice trembles, only so slightly.

"I understand," Sara says, resigned, and Kelly feels for her something she didn't feel for another human being in years. _Compassion. He is making her do this, and she goes along with it. If it was up to her they would have driven half the American continent away from St Agatha by now. And they would have arrived nowhere._ Kelly's state employers have means to catch Sara and Michael Scofield on the run, and Ralph (Roger, she curses) has his network as well. There is nowhere they can go. Even if they may not know it themselves.

Michael, however, is extremely smart, as Kelly already concluded. He carelessly adds to their truncated conversation full of hints and reproaches, smiling as a boy he probably never was, with low latent inhibition filling up his mind with perceptions on a regular basis. "The floor heating," he says, "I think it was what made me sick last night They were trying to improve it last week in my wing, but they only made it worse. Too warm. I believe that it works to a perfection. I wouldn't have it touched upon further if I were you."

He says that, and the camera records it, but the sophisticated piece of technical equipment is totally incapable of getting the meaning behind his words. Kelly, however, understands immediately. She is being blackmailed. When Roger made her cause the overload that could have ended by seriously hurting Sara, to test Michael's motivation, he didn't go to her through the ceilings as he did in Fox River. He went through the floors. Kelly catches other signs too. Michael and Sara both move lazily, not nervously as they did since she had met them both. It would appear that their personal reunion after five years had been much more successful than hers and Paul's hopeless groping on the wood floor. She envies them for that and suppresses the ugly feeling flooding her chest at the thought of their happiness.

Because if Michael is back of his own free will after _that_ , there is only one possible explanation. His heart is too big his own good. The magnitude of Michael's generosity shocks her when she sees it at work, even if it was the main reason she chose him to do what they needed. But it's one thing to examine something theoretically and quite another to see it for real.

They managed to manipulate his compassionate character and his latent feelings for Lincoln just as they wanted. He must have transferred them to Roger, the man who is nothing to him, and who is, unlike Lincoln, guilty of so many crimes, that the state will probably never establish the extent of his guilt. Seven cumulative death penalties would not be enough to make him pay, if one believed that being put to death was an acceptable punishment to start with. Kelly's own attitude towards it has always been a bit mixed and she tries to avoid the question. It is not up to her to make state laws or federal laws.

It is only up to her to get those plans.

Before they find their way to North Korea.

"I understand," she responds to a blackmail, "you speak from your experience of a construction engineer."

"Oh," Michael says and Kelly knows Sara didn't find the courage to talk to him about their past, or perhaps very little. She doubt she would have had the courage if she was in her shoes. Or in pretty sandals as Sara is wearing that day under her trademark jeans. A new detail, a hope that could be in vain.

"I will take your opinion under advice," Kelly says innocently, "yet I can ensure you that while you may have found the doors open last night, if you suffered from an even more _serious_ disorder, you would have been prevented from walking through _any_ passage existing in this clinic."

She gets out, almost runs out, wants some air to breath.

She has taken a big risk, and she leaves them to ponder her words.

xxxxxxxx

**Early in the morning in front of Sara's house in Helena, Montana**

Sucre's consciousness was always a bit late when it came to the right thing to do. And so it is that he knows they keep Michael in St Agatha for more than a week, yet it's only now that he stands in front of Sara's house.

He wasn't able to find out anything about why they have him or why he doesn't know who he is, even after several friendly and semi-friendly conversations with all the staff he could meet in his position of the gardener. All their faces would go blank whenever he would try to discuss the clinic, its policy or its patients. It was only the CEO, Ms Davis, who practically _pointed_ him at Michael, and the more he thinks about it, he curses himself for stupid.

She must have done it on purpose, and by blindly going to his best friend, he must have given Miss Davis something she wanted, a recognition, a confirmation, some small victory.

So he has to let someone know, someone smarter than he is. They have to see together what can be done before they tell Sara and shock her to death. His first choice is Lincoln, or Mahone if he is at Sara's place as well.

It is early in the morning, but late enough that Sara should have gone to work. Sucre is late for his own early shift, but he doesn't care. Portoricans are known to be late, and it is the first time he's going to do just that. Sometimes he has to live up to the stereotypes, doesn't he? Not to attract any extra attention to himself or let them think he is more than he looks. Even if the lady CEO should already know very well who he is.

It's Kellerman who opens the door.

"Where is Lincoln?" Sucre asks, straight to the point.

"Gone for a walk," Kellerman answers looking around, as if he's afraid someone from the clinic had been following Sucre.

"A walk?" Sucre can't believe his luck.

"Come in," Kellerman says still eyeing the green surroundings of the house with distrust.

In Sara's parlour Kellerman clarifies his thoughts. "Or maybe a drive."

"With Mahone," Sucre assumes and he's unfortunately right. He sees it on Kellerman's face before the bold ugly man Fernando never liked (just like Sara, he remembers) can nod.

"Okay then," Fernando says, "tell him that I was looking for him when he returns."

"Anything he should know?" Kellerman inquires.

"No," Sucre shakes his head and puts up his best smile when he's not admitting the truth. He doesn't trust former murderer with information on Michael. He wouldn't trust Mahone either. He ponders he should call LJ or Sofia. They should be able to reach Linc directly. He curses himself for not having Linc's personal number as he should. "I'll be late for work," he says. "See you around."

Several hours later in St Agatha they make him prune the rose bush in front of a room on the ground floor with bars on the windows. He's never done it before. He does it wondering if he did right or wrong by not telling about Michael. Behind the bars he catches the image of an elderly man with grey hair whom he had seen earlier in the closed part of the garden. The one rebelling against the clinic. The man is looking at his determined wrinkled face in the mirror, and he's pulling faces, as if he was an actor or an _artist,_ where he's clearly neither. A lunatic, or a criminal, perhaps, if Sucre can trust his instincts.

The man adjusts his face, puts his hands together in prayer and directs his gaze upwards. Sucre has to wonder where he had seen such expression.

A bush of luminous white roses gets pruned entirely, as large as a parked car, before Fernando processes what he had seen, and, then he just knows.

Despite _not_ sharing the looks, the man with greying hair, Roger, if Sucre remembers his name correctly, is doing his best to leave the same impression as Lincoln.

Fernando shivers wondering what to do with _that_ new information. Hoping physical work will bring him to a point of revelation which he is seriously lacking, Sucre makes several signs of the cross to chase the evil away, and continues pruning.

xxxxx

Ralph looks at the mirror in his new room and likes what he sees. He has done his homework on the two brothers on whom everything depends now, much more thoroughly than it ever depended on Kelly. Poor Kelly, thinking herself so smart when she is so stupid. He will have her squirming with pleasure under him before he puts a bullet in her belly. He'll do it in person and watch her die if time allows. Or maybe if he's really lucky in his plans, Michael will shoot her for him, Ralph hopes. It would be cleaner that way, and Ralph could still enjoy her death. There is no other punishment for someone who thought to outsmart him by stealing and selling _his_ plans. The work of his lifetime.

Than he can abandon the stupid name, Roger, behind. The name government has to keep him in prison.

Ralph's gestures and expressions are perfect, and he has no doubt about his success. Rumour about Scofield's escape has come to him fast through his spies, and the news of his miraculous return even faster. It's better than Ralph had hoped.

 _The confused kid had come back for me,_ he laughs inwardly schooling his impression in a neutral one. _And to find answers about himself._

The wires Roger's friend had installed in Sara's house, just in case, (and that not even Kelly's incapable former boyfriend was able to uncover despite his fine governmental breeding to work as an agent and a bodyguard with very _extensive_ powers to act) served their purpose. Ralph knows before Kelly ever will that Michael had good sex, but Sara didn't have the guts to spill him their history not even to tell him he was her husband. _Marvelous,_ he rejoices.

Michael's compassion will be his undoing and Ralph's salvation, providing that the Scofield kid finds a way out of St Agatha's. Because not even Ralph with his _very_ considerable resources and capabilities, or Kelly who wants to make money on _his_ plans herself, have been able to. Ralph says a prayer to the god who looks after the audacious, after those who do not feel regrets, those who do whatever has be done to make the world a place fit for the strong. Michael may be smart but he is weak. _In the end it will all work for the better_ , Ralph is confident. Scofield will serve his purpose and than he will be out of the picture. Dead or alive with his good looking wife, it matters little once Roger has flown out of the country. (Although ending up dead is a more likely option for both Michael ans Sara, but it's not Ralph's first consideration.)

 _First things first,_ Ralph knows, banishing the sense of imminent victory after 5 years of most secure imprisonment he has ever endured from his mind. (Not that it prevented him to download the plans everybody is now looking for from the equipment deemed secure by the government). He looks at the mirror and schools himself to offer a hopeless, credulous gaze just as if he shared a personality with Lincoln. He refuses to remember that he may have been just like Lincoln when he was 20. That man no longer exists. Ralph did his best to murder him early enough in his life. He delves into the depths of his being now, to bring that dead boy back in front. Just for as long as it is needed.

xxxxxx

Sara's day in the infirmary is busy and she is happy about it. It leaves her with little time to think of how she chickened out and didn't talk to Michael.

As she should. Both as his wife, and as a physician. It is clear he does suffer from a psychological disorder or a loss of memory of which she should try and establish the scope. Than she should consult another professional, not Kelly, someone objective, someone who could help him.

But no one ever wanted to help Michael Scofield, not since his master mind capabilities were discovered. Private and state actors only sought to use him as a weapon or a tool for their ends. Maybe they should go to Europe, pay a doctor who doesn't know them, and see that he gets properly treated. She doesn't have enough funds for that. Her father's inheritance was claimed by the debtors when he died. It was probably a foul play from either Kellerman in his old days, or the Company. She should file a law suit over that, but she has neither the time, nor the money.

Kelly kept her word by transferring Michael's medical file to her desktop, a part of it, Sara knows, but it's still more than she expected from the CEO of the so called clinic employing her. The dimension and the evilness of the scam the Company performed with Michael's blood work fills her with anger. She would blast all of them just like she had shot Michael's mother in cold blood. She approves all over again that the General had been put on the chair. She finds it a just thing despite not really approving of the death penalty in general. _Those who take up a sword shall perish by a sword,_ she remembers, from somewhere.

It leaves her with the only option, the most frightening one.

To wait.

And to trust that when they couldn't do it before, when Michael was in his right mind, her husband and her can help themselves. She hurries home after work to fetch Mikey from school, and she's unable to tell him anything either.

She's unable to tell her kid his father is alive when he might die in the weeks to come. If he doesn't find the answers he is seeking, and if he doesn't find the way out for him and the man he wants to save, before Dr Davis proceeds to _use_ Michael as a guinea pig for her sinister surgical procedures.

Sara shudders and decides to wait.

Until she doesn't. When Mikey is asleep, she gets the gun she still has somewhere and returns to the clinic in the evening. The night guards are already used to seeing her. The workaholic doctor who returns at night to look at her files. She doesn't even check that Kellerman is not on the couch where he should be.

In her office, she hides the gun in one of the drawers, careful to avoid any spots where she believes there are cameras. She's alone so she doesn't talk in case that there are wires. Close to midnight she is ready to go home when a slab on the floor moves and she nearly gets the gun and aims at the threat, imagining a large prisoner such as the one that attacked her during lockdown at Fox River all those years ago.

In the last second she remembers that she's not in Fox River despite that St Agatha is an equally threatening environment with other types of danger lurking around.

She swallows and exhales when a familiar bold soft looking head helplessly protrudes from the floor. She pulls Michael out and into her embrace and she whispers (hopefully below the sound level the security equipment in her office can record).

"The floor heating," she mutters.

He is silent, crawling like a snake to a particular spot on the wall where an innocent power outlet stands empty waiting for a cell phone charger or another device to be plugged in. He inserts an end of metal spoon he brought with him in the socket, holding

the other end of the spoon with some kind of synthetic material.. _Isolation,_ she realizes.

The room goes black as the circuit goes short.

Then, she is in his arms again, strong and warm as ever, and they are moving to the patient cot on the side, touching the walls to avoid toppling over furniture, like one blind person leading another.

"Hey," he says, "did you seriously think I would go back in if I didn't have a way to be with you again?"

"I was not supposed to be here tonight," she protests weakly.

"But you are," he says and from the tone of his voice she can hear that he is smiling.


	12. Swap

**T-Bag's room, St Agatha, around 6 am**

Theodore Bagwell doesn't know where they are taking him. But it surely ain't be a good thing in the god forsaken lab for experimental rats where he brought himself by his own stupidity and desire for a little comfort in his miserable life of an inmate. So he screams like a madman he is one way or the other, and sinks his teeth greedily in the flesh of one of the (female) attendants when she is not careful enough. Her incoherent crying makes him somewhat happier about the situation, but than two men take over. They ain't gentle. Soon he's bruised, stored and left alone in a very peculiar hospital room. There is no window there and the old time equipment frightens him as if they had put him on an old fashioned plane and made him fly over the ocean.

In the middle of the room there is that odd thing looking like a primitive electric chair he had seen in a Muppet Show movie as a kid in his father's house. He's a big boy now but he still shivers when he remembers his father and the practices he had taught him. They wanted to fry the frog character in that kind of chair if he still remembers the movie correctly. He never thought that anything similar could still be in existence. T-Bag laughs incredulously yet he keeps away from it, wondering why he's in that strange room to start with. A huge square computer is attached to the chair with some odd looking colourful cables, which are the only modern pieces of the equipment in front of him, as far as he can tell. The computer casing and the keyboard are completely yellow. All in all, it's stuff no one uses any more. He heard that nowadays they ship such electronic garbage to Africa so that they wouldn't pollute the American soil. No one needs such machines in rich and developed countries..

Hours pass, and in the absence of a better thing to do, he presses a button on a computer casing and the screen illuminates, blindly obeying orders. _Why isn't it that easy with women,_ he thinks, deprived of sex, consensual or not, since he ended up in St Agatha.

He hears steps outside the room, still reasonably far. He tries to switch off the damn thing in case he was not supposed to touch it. It doesn't work. The thing is asking for password he doesn't know. Afraid, for no reason, or for a very good reason, he can't really tell, he plugs out the electricity cable. But the damn thing has a battery of its own and the happy blue screen asking for password keeps on smiling at T-Bag who is tempted to growl at it like a beast. In the end he gives up and offers the machine his best look of a maniac. Inclined to break the screen to resolve his little prying problem, he finds there is no tool strong enough accessible in the room. He can break it loose only by his bare arms. _The hospital doesn't want the prisoners to harm themselves or their property, no sir, the clinic will take care of any such try_ , he thinks cynically.

The steps are at the door.

Resigned, he sits in a chair like the frog from that movie. There is no other place to sit down anyway. The computer is lacking a chair. The surface he is sitting on is rough. _Couldn't they make a plain chair in the old days,_ he thinks, scratching the wood under his buttocks. The good hand he has wonders under the chair, and finds a tiny flat thing inserted between two boards the seat is made off. Curious, he tries to pull it out. He manages to do it just when they come in, to take him away again. He successfully tucks the minuscule something in one of his pockets. Luckily, the patient ( _inmate_ , he thinks) attire in St Agatha does have pockets.

They come in and the fat man who kicked him in the guts and all over his head (after he bit that stupid cow) says: "There has been a mistake. Let's go back."

T-Bag wonders if they will now take him to some place where they summarily execute prisoners by shooting them in the head before burying them in the courtyard next to the stinky pruned rose bushes. Maybe that awaited the true psychopaths like himself.

Instead, he is only returned to his room. The daylight peeks shyly through the window, and judging by the time of the day, his breakfast should be brought in rather soon.

He gets the finding out of his pocket, but has the last minutes sense to keep it in the palms of his hands so that cameras in his room (he has seen them, he is crazy, but he is not that _stupid)_ cannot record his finding. A disappointment, really, a thin little card such as they put in modern day cameras, to have more space for photos. ( _He hates family photos,_ he has to remember. ) At least he thinks the card is for that, never having had such a camera himself. It's not a bag with millions of dollars which had disappeared somewhere in South America, but it's the only thing he's got that someone bothered to hide in the clinic. So maybe it's worth something to someone. He closes his palms in a ball, pretending he is cold, and carefully places the little thing in the front pocket of his shirt, right above his sick heart.

Breakfast comes in and the coffee smell makes him happy. Whatever St Agatha does to people, they haven't done it to him yet. And he will get out if it's the last thing he does. He tries to imagine what Michael Scofield the genius would do in his situation. He closes his eyes thinking hard. When he opens them, his mind is equally empty as before he has ever tried to concentrate. He is not Scofield... Not in looks, not in brains. Angry with that knowledge he hits the mirror above the lavatory with his artificial hand and enjoys the blossoming of the broken glass, and the new damage to the horrible plastic limb he'll have to wear for the rest of his hopefully long life.

xxxxxxxx

**Some hours later, special room in St Agatha, the same one T-Bag was in**

"You're not afraid?" the fat man asks Ralph. "Some in your position, those who know what chances are for this to succeed, dirty their pants on the way here.

"Why should I be afraid of the known risks?" Roger asks back. "I'm only afraid of the unknown."

Roger finds the look of incomprehension on the face of the fat attendant extremely funny. He was just brought to the special room where Kelly prepares her patients for the experimental procedure of brain treatment, usually with small chance of any of them ever getting up on their feet. Davis should be there any moment, he reckons, hoping she'll wear a short skirt. Now that he's marked as a lunatic, he could just as well have her on the primitive chair she's using for the diagnostics.

Cheerful, he sits on the chair and looks forward to it. His hands, on the contrary, are searching for something else. Something that belongs to him.

Something that's not there.

Cold rage threatens to overtake him. He keeps it at bay. It's not the good time to get angry. Lincoln never got angry in those pitiful moments of his life. Only melancholic and religious from what Ralph has learned.

He looks for it again because it _has_ to be there. And no one else had been brought to this room, because he was the only one scheduled for the procedure in the coming days, and the last time he was on the diagnostic chair, his memory card was still there.

_They're gone... A job worth millions... A billion, maybe, if he is lucky to find a generous buyer._

Getting out of St Agatha is very important. But he has also invested too much time and effort in obtaining those plans and putting them to the missing memory card. _Five years of my life._ He doesn't think Kelly ever thought pushing her delicate hand of a surgeon between the two boards forming the seat of the chair. She wants her device to look old fashioned and untouched, to leave better impression on clients. He might find a way to download those plans again, but it would take too much time and he's out of memory cards to store data. He could use one of his attendant contacts to procure him a new card, but his helper might be wise enough to tip the Korean client that the things were not going smoothly, and it's the last thing Ralph wants to happen.

Kelly barges in around 9 am and to his disappointment she is wearing pants, black and classy, narrowing at her rounded butt. The view is gorgeous if somewhat inaccessible. When she dismisses her helpers as their superior and attaches his head to the chair, to start her calculus or whatever she has to pretend to be doing, he snaps. He's still stronger than her, so he pulls her in his lap until she involuntarily straddles him.

Wires are tied to his head, and the old computer is beeping, when he forces her out of her jeans. She wriggles and gets away from him, using her garment as an excuse. Playfully, she puts her head where he always imagined it instead of sitting on him as he intended. It's not as good as what he wanted to do, but she makes it up to him in a way that he asks himself, once she is done, if her part time job during school was not the oldest profession.

Professionally, she wipes her mouth and proceeds to look at the recorded computer data, as if she didn't do anything special just seconds ago.

"No one has been here between Mr Morris and me?" he asks, chest heaving, slowly getting his brains back to the place where they are supposed to be.

"No, why?" she asks back in all innocence, and he refuses to answer.

"Don't know," he says arrogantly, "I find the chair wobbly, that's all. I just thought it'd break while you were busy helping me relax. Take it as the doctor-patient confidence, I'd just like to know who else you were having here on it, those kind of things." He does his best that the last sentence sounds jealous, hoping it will provoke an answer.

"It's an old thing all right," she says, and asks a question of her own. "It's a bit shaky, that's all. Have you been here before?"

"Once or twice five years ago when they installed everything at this bloody place. They didn't know where to keep me and the three original patients at the time, may they all rest in peace now. It was before I learned that they employed you of all people, to supervise me against escaping, not knowing of our association."

"I wish there was a window here," she says matter of factly, "but then the recorded data would not be accurate."

"You should know best," he says and wants to pull her back on himself, this time not letting her get away without going all the way with him. He'll have to check with the attendant he pays if someone was there after all. If someone had stolen his plans. He doesn't trust Kelly to give him that information freely.

Cold rage possesses him from the inside, burning. If someone had been there, and took _his_ plans, he's as good as dead. Even without an experimental brain surgery to ease his passing.

Xxxxxxxx

**Sara's Office about the same time when T-Bag is taken to the special room**

He stirs on the bed which doesn't feel like his. Not that the luxury hospital bed he has had in St Agatha, the only bed he can remember, ever felt his in any degree. He's stiff and uncomfortable, until he wants to move his right arm and feels a warm sleeping body and the waves of silky hair. _Sara..._ Her name sounds like a blessing. A thin sheet is draped over both of them, and that is about the only textile present on the spot.

He adores it that way.

He stirs and nearly falls off the bed, too small for both of them. The clumsiness of his attempt to move wakes her up and she gives him a relaxed smile.

"What's the time?" she asks, not quite awake.

"I'd better go," he says, contradicted.

"I should go to," she replies, "drive back home, take my son to school..."

"Your son?" he asks, taken by a way of jealousy, imagining the child's father who's probably someone who can at least remember his name. He doesn't ask about him only because he doesn't need to know the truth. He wants to believe she will be there for him every time he crawls through the floor to see her. Until he gets Roger, and as many other patients as possible, out of the

St Agatha's wing where certain death is awaiting them, one at the time.

"Yes," she says and studies him as if she can see through his unease without seeing any cause for it.

"How old is he?" he forces himself to make an innocuous question.

"Five," she replies smiling at him as if he should be _thrilled_ with the news.

"Five," he repeats. "Okay," he says, not knowing anything better.

"We'll talk about Mikey some other time, okay?" she says, getting more awake, disentangling herself from his arms. "I should really bring him to school. I don't have a babysitter or anything, I was mostly doing everything by myself since we moved here."

 _That is well,_ Michael thinks. _Alone._ It has to be enough. If she's alone now, maybe she will take him in. Even if he is a murderer and a psychopath and god knows what else.

"Will I see you later?" he asks, timidly.

"Not tonight," she says, regret palpable in her words. "There's some party after school, for the end of the school year. And I have to sleep some." She blushes at the last words. "I still have to work later today."

"Maybe at the end of your working hours then?" he blurts.

"Maybe," she says and lightens up. "If it's safe for you..."

"I'll see," he says and hobbles to the spoon in the wall. When he retrieves it, he wonders what disorder his little sabotage may have created in the meticulously round the clock work of St Agatha. He suspects that some routines, sub-routines and schedules may have been affected. Patients brought to places where they were not supposed to be.

He allows himself some gly feelings and hopes he interfered with the cleaning of Kelly's office, so that the first thing she finds is the pile of garbage instead of the fresh smell of the floor detergent. She looks like a kind of person who could be bothered by that, he concludes.

"Can they see us now?" Sara asks.

"Probably," he says, "if they bother to look. Then again, they have too much security tape to look at, so I guess that they will only view it if there's trouble in certain parts of building. Everything else will remain archived forever and not serve a single thing." He wonders how he knows all that, but he's certain he's telling her the truth.

"Oh," the mischief glowing in her eyes is clear, as she guides him back to the flat position on the cot they have been sharing. She is softer than anything he had ever known, and she gives herself away with an ease that frightens him. He is not the man she needs, he fears that he's not.

It's not very creative and it's the oldest way people do it, he guesses, the man is supposed to be strong one, the one on top. He doesn't feel strong at all; he is weak and he is lost. He drains the strength he lacks from her arms, and he really hopes her kid will not be late to school because of this, because of them. He's happy he doesn't remember any other woman in his life, so the only memory he has is of her, and he hopes it will be her until the end of his days.

When they are done, he cannot help but wonder what kind of man was able to leave her and his child. After having tasted her the way Michael had done in the past two days.

"I should go," it's her turn to announce, and she sounds like she doesn't want to be going.

When he closes the floor slab over his head, Michael lets the perceptions run over, enjoys the look of pipes, screws, and valves, of empty narrow tunnel he is crawling through, lucky that the place is relatively new. So that he doesn't meet a rat despite that the passage he is in would be perfect for a rat hole.

His mind is soon too full of useless information, but it serves the purpose of stopping to dwell on Sara. He has to, and he will focus on other things. Kelly's words ring in his mind, the last ones before she ran away from Sara's office for all practical purposes. _So if I did something really horrible, I wouldn't be able to pass under the wall, she insinuated. What if Roger did something like that? Do they have something special to keep him between the walls? To know when he leaves?_

If they do, he has to find what it is and disable it before any attempt to break out.

He doesn't get why Kelly would do anything to help him, why she would pass to him potentially useful information.

Brain full of questions, he's back to his room. In half an hour breakfast is served, and for the first time since he's in St Agatha he devours scrambled eggs instead of cereals. He could eat the tray from the hunger he has. He doesn't eat it, despite giving it a serious consideration. He looks through his window and instead of looking down, looking for her, his gaze moves up over the roof of the part of the clinic he is in. At places, the tall evergreen trees grow close to it, close enough that one could bridge the distance with a rope, cross it, and climb down.

There will be obstacles on that path as well, and he has no idea where they keep Roger or even if the man is still alive.

He doesn't know yet, but he will do his best to find out.

He doesn't even realize how tired he is, from everything.

When they come in later, to collect his dishes after breakfast, they find him asleep in bed, smiling, empty tray held in place by his bare bony knees.

Xxxxxx

**Lunchtime, in front of St Agatha's**

Kelly takes her lunch out in a paper bag and walks through the gates wishing to have her midday meal in nature. The car is left behind, and the idea of driving disgusts her. She needs freshness, and an open space. Somewhere where there are no people.

As soon as she starts walking among the trees, she knows it's a terribly bad idea. The soiled feeling she has ever since she serviced Roger as a common whore, to avoid having proper sex with the man, doesn't go away. It won't go away with lettuce and shrimps either.

It gets worse soon, because someone has followed her from the gates, and she doesn't even have to turn to know who the person is.

"What do you want, Paul," she says without looking back. "Share a salad?"

"I just wanted to talk," he tries his best to be civil.

"We were never good at that, remember?"

"I was not good at many things before," he admits. "I never thought I'd leave the job I had with Caroline Reynolds but I did. Maybe you could, too."

"It's late for that," she says, sitting on the grass, and leaning against a young fir tree. Its bark smells sweet in the sunlight. She unwraps the plastic fork and carefully spreads the dressing over the salad.

He sits several steps away from her, almost with respect. "There's just this one thing," he says, "before you get me all wrong again."

"And what would that be?" she interrupts before she allows him to say his piece. "I still haven't killed the late governor's daughter if that's what you're worried about."

"In part I am, and I won't deny it," Paul says very seriously. "Sara is the reason I came to Montana, not you."

Kelly had always known that, yet she hates the sinking feeling on the inside, the weakness she doesn't show to Paul, but which is nevertheless there. Like a bad TV show where the main female character swoons over a worthless male for roughly hundred episodes and the housewives cry about it between taking kids to school and filling up the dishwasher. She hates to be that way, she really does.

"But then," Paul continues even if there's nothing more he can say, nothing that can make her feel any better, "I know who you are, don't think that I don't. I know it better than anyone. I know what you're capable of, what you did to me, what you did to others. The level of cruelty you can have towards others, its higher than my own used to be. I know all that..."

Kelly stubbornly puts a shrimp and a portion of lettuce in her thin red mouth, wishing that the food would not taste like Roger, nor like bitter deception stemming from Paul's words.

"I know all that and yet I'm damn sorry I left you after you shot me."

The next portion of lettuce gets stuck in Kelly's throat.

"Yesterday I drove back here after Sara at knight, and I stayed parked in the woods until now, and I could only think about one single thing."

She almost chokes when he finishes his piece.

"I know all there is to know about you, yet all I have in my head since I came here is you."

When he says that, he stands up and goes away, abruptly, as if he's embarrassed about his admission.

"Just so that you know," he yells at her when he's many steps away form her as if she was not a woman, but a contagious disease.

Kelly remains seated in the sun and wonders if his words are just some new tactics to help Sara. She knows that they probably are but more than anything else in the world, she wishes to believe that they are not.

She forces herself not to believe Paul, eats her salad, and returns to St Agatha.

That is her life, for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for leaving kudos. The updates for this story will now be somewhat slower, but it will continue.


	13. Over the Top

 

**Garden, closed ward, St Agatha's, in the heat of a summer afternoon**

The sun is all over the garden again and Michael feels almost too good to be true. He doesn't remember when was the last time he felt that way. Then again, he doesn't remember that much of his life at all. He'd ask Kelly about it if he wasn't too proud to beg, and if he believed that she'd tell him the truth to start with. He'd ask Sara if he wasn't afraid of what she might tell him and how it could influence the best thing that has happened to him since he woke up in St Agatha's and wiggled the toes he still has.

_There is another way_ , he thinks, and he's quite serious about it. As serious as he can be, and he's got a strong suspicion he can be much more serious about things than most people. _Persistent. Overly-efficient. Insane._ It's a possibility he really needs some kind of brain treatment, and he's terrified of contemplating it rationally.

Michael has to have more than the first name. He has to have a last name. And then the computers in the room they use to watch him, which have become as easily accessible as the toilet in Michael's own single bedroom, will tell him everything he needs to know.

Without having to ask anyone.

Priorities are however different. He should be working on a _plan_ , he knows, but he's not. The warm smell of freshly mowed grass is distracting his senses, and the ton of perceptions he's unwillingly picking up from his surroundings stimulates rest, and sleep, still badly needed after a night spent crawling in the floor heating system and… Well… He'd still be at it if he could. And if he gets out of St Agatha with Roger, he imagines he can spend as much time with Sara as they both like. It's definitely something to look forward to.

So he whistles cheerfully towards Sucre as soon as he sees him from afar, assuming his usual gardening position in the other part of the St Agatha's greenery, where those same three patients quarrel again about the usefulness of the sinister medical procedures performed. Roger's absence is conspicuous, there will be one more mortal victim of the state of the art clinic if Michael is unable to work fast.

"Hey," he says, when Fernando comes to him without any hesitation, smiling as a true friend might. "How are you?" he asks for the sake of asking. _If you are using people, you could just as well be nice to them,_ Michael believes firmly, suppressing the guilt of using them in the first place.

"Could be better, papi," Fernando says and waits. As if he knows him good enough to know that Michael always _needs_ something from people. A fact that doesn't make him too proud about himself at all, but which is undeniable, and maybe, maybe, it has helped him survive in the past. It has to help him now, because there's no one really he can rely on but himself. And now his resourcefulness and willingness to do the good thing by any means necessary might help an honest looking man not to undergo a cerebral lobotomy or whatever is being done to the patients of the St Agatha's closed ward, in the name of some abstract public good Michael never believed in.

"Do you have any idea where they keep Roger, you know, a bit older guy, the one who doesn't want this operation?" Michael asks innocently.

"I do," Fernando says, "on the ground floor from the other side of the wing they keep you in. But, man, he's weird,"

"How?" Michael asks.

"He's pulling all those faces in front of a mirror," Sucre is cautious but Michael knows there is more to it. There has to be. "As if he's a circus guy or something."

"Any way to get him out of there? What do you think?"

Sucre looks up, and Michael follows his gaze. Kelly is staring at them from one of the windows on the top floor right above them. Her face is a mask of quiet indifference. She could be sun bathing or day dreaming the way she looks, sharp black hair in contrast with a white doctor's coat, if the sharp gaze of her black eyes did not betray the center of her attentions. Michael and Sucre, without any doubt.

"Well," Fernando says, measuring his words. "Either through the clinic and then to some door, or over the roof, I'd say from where we are now."

Michael looks up too, but he doesn't pay attention to Kelly. He studies all the walls of the precinct he can see, not only the one he went under to find the best thing in his life. He knows he has to do something Kelly Davis and the builders of the place he's in did not take into their calculations. In any construction, there are always little things not accounted for. Things that will help him do what needs to be done. The walls are meticulously secured on the top, that much is more than clear. But there is this new idea in Michael's head, developing into something bigger ever since Sucre had mentioned it: _the circus guy._ And the roof of the building looks rather innocent. Like a roof and nothing more. It could be his impression, of course, and as soon as he's able to, he'll have to check himself.

The expression on Fernando's face freezes again. Precisely at the moment when the ugly patient, Theodore Bagwell, walks out to approach the two who are eagerly waiting for the procedure, unlike Roger ever was. Bagwell is a bit older than both Fernando and Michael. He has an artificial hand, and on that day his eyes look, well, dead, as Michael imagines a genuine serial killer should look. He hopes he will never look that way.

"Jesus Christ," Fernando says without thinking, "next thing we'll see Lincoln imprisoned again, or Abruzzi coming from the dead."

"Who's Lincoln?" Michael asks vehemently back because _that_ name sounds important. More important than Roger.

The gardener doesn't answer him, but his warm brown eyes turn all emotional from Michael's question as if the fact that Michael doesn't know who Lincoln is might make him cry on the spot.

"What is important," Fernando says slowly, "is that Lincoln is _not_ here and not waiting for any procedures. Lincoln is free, Michael. Think of that."

And then, just like Michael and Sucre noticed the ugly patient, he seems to be discovering their presence in the clinic for the very first time. Michael realizes he's standing in the sun without his peculiar straw hat on for the first time since he woke up. He must have been so lost in his memories of Sara that he never picked it up from his room, forgetting he could get sick again if he didn't cover his head. The look of shock on the ugly patient's face is prominent, and instantly replaced with a kind of mean satisfaction. _He would walk to them_ , Michael knows. But only the gardener is allowed to the part of the premises where the people from St Agatha keep Michael locked up, so the newcomer can only come so far: to the fence closest to where Fernando and Michael are standing.

"Fish," he tells them, and Michael is not sure whom he is addressing. "I heard you died."

"So did I," Michael responds evenly, feigning indifference, earning a look of admiration from his Portorican friend.

"Glad you didn't, though," the ugly man says. "Listen, ya, I know we didn't see eye to eye in the past. But that's all in the past, okay?" The man rolls his eyes in desperation that doesn't look fake. _Everything else about him looks fake, though,_ Michael concludes.

"Now I want in, okay?" the man says, "I'll do anything you need, no surprises… I promise!"

"No suprises…" Michael says coldly. "Now why does that surprise me?"

Fernando chuckles and says, pointedly: "Because T-Bag is full of surprises."

Then, Michael is surprised. If Fernando knows this… _T-Bag…_ Does Sucre know Michael too? Do they all know him? And is he the only idiot who's being manipulated into doing god knows what for someone else's account while he has no idea who he is.

"I'll think about it, T-Bag," Michael says with authority in his normally calm voice. "On the condition that you leave us _now._ "

"As you say, fish," T-Bag says, spreading his arms wide, palms open towards them, in sign of surrender and good will. Faster than necessary, he backs off to the other two patients, the older and the younger one, who seem perfectly at ease in St. Agatha's, enjoying the sun. As if nothing wrong has ever happened in the damn clinic.

When he is far enough, Michael pierces Fernando with his blue-green look and asks with the same determination he used to get rid of T-Bag: "Tell me my last name."

Fernando looks to the ground, looks up where Kelly is spying on them. Looks to the ground again. Finds the courage he's missing, somewhere. When he dares to return Michael's look, straight in the eye, his own eyes are almost tearing again, for the second time that afternoon.

"You're not feeling well, are you," he stutters and makes a step back, provoking Michael, who somehow understands that what Fernando needs at that moment is for Michael to confirm his story. Michael stumbles forward, nearly pulling Sucre to the ground, and ae he does it, a glossy paper is being stuck in his pants, under the too dark grey T-shirt they are making him wear despite the heat, while the other patients are being dressed in more suitable lighter clothing. T-Bag has an immaculately white T-shirt and somehow the colour doesn't fit him at all.

"I'll call the attendants," Fernando says, gesturing to Ms Davis above.

When they bring him back to his room, when they lay him forcefully in bed and administer him some calming product, Michael lies in a foetal position resigned with the fact he'll have to wait until he wakes up, and the stuff they injected him leaves his system. He'll waste another day he doesn't have. Another day when he didn't reach Roger, who may have been murdered in the meantime for all he knows.

Hours later, when he is awake and alone, he goes to the corner of his room that the camera is unable to record in detail, and retrieves Fernando's gift. It's a photograph of a grave. The image is unusually clear, and the inscription on a rather simple gravestone says:

MICHAEL J. SCOFIELD

10\. 9. 1974. - 11. 4. 2005.

Husband, Father, Brother, Uncle, Friend

_Be the change you want to see in the world_

He wonders which of those things he was, or still is, to Fernando.

And what he was, or still is, to Sara.

_She's the change I want to keep in my world,_ he knows at least that, as he patiently waits for the hour to be late enough to go to the computers and find out who he is and what he did in his previous life.

xxxxxx

**Washington DC, near the governmental premises which are not supposed to exist**

The register of special agents answering directly to the Oval Office is an even more innocuous place than the one Mahone and Lincoln visited before.

It's housed in an apartment block of at least 200 apartments and 20 floors, somewhere in the middle of a completely mediocre building no one would relate to anything of any importance. But the floor where it is hidden has a double layer of most advanced physical protection. The walls and the door are reinforced against any attack. No one can access it, except for a few holders of the special limited edition of biometric cards, only three at the time, and they are exchanged on duty every six months. Than the new cards are issued and the new guards come.

"The staff does not know what they are maintaining", Mahone tells Lincoln. "It's safer that way for everyone. They think it's some register of war veterans or something, for their pensions or similar rights."

"How do we get in?" Lincoln asks, more blunt than usual. They are wasting time and they should go back to Montana before something happens to Sara and Mikey. He's got to get her out of there. He owes that and much more to his little brother.

"Only one of us does," Mahone informs him as they take the stairs all the way to the roof, avoiding the elevators and the floor they need to break in as widely as possible. "The main water pipes run through the building in a single shaft behind all the toilets. Even if where we have to go the toilet is not in usage. But it's most likely the least protected door of the premises."

Lincoln doesn't know how he got himself into that. If they catch them, he's sure to go to prison again. Not a place he wants to go ever again in his life. Yet he obediently nods and agrees with Mahone's visionary stare, as he is lowered down the shaft on a special thin chain used to scale mountains. In a small backpack he carries a drill, a special model that emits no sound. It should do to drill one hole through the lock of the toilet. Theoretically, that should open the door, and once he leaves, the servicemen of the register should not notice immediately that something has happened and even less that there had been an intrusion.

Arriving to the correct toilet is easy, entering the secret office is almost too easy too. Everything is going too much according to the plan. He has 25 minutes alone in the apartment during the change of shift, the time it takes for one employee to descend to the ground floor, exchange some kind of login book with his colleague, and for his colleague to take the elevator and come up.

Typing Kelly's full name in the only computer which is switched on in the meticulously tidy office gives no result, just like Mahone predicted.

Lincoln follows Alex' second instruction. He slides Kelly's a recent photograph in an odd looking scanner next to the screen and waits.

And that is the moment when all goes wrong as the best plans usually do. As soon as the machine has swallowed the photograph entirely, all equipment, even the one that seemed switched off, starts beeping and blinking. No information is displayed, but one of the empty screen turns red, as are a few buttons on a keyboard.

An alarm that Lincoln was _not_ supposed to trigger by entering through the toilet goes off in all its magnificence and glory. 25 minutes will become less now, he knows. Michael would be able to calculate Linc's exact odds to get out before he gets arrested, _if he was alive._

Lincoln wishes Michael was alive, but he still prefers not knowing the odds. For him, now knowing gives him the strength to fight and run away before it's too late.

When he touches the toilet door, the alarm screams even higher, and he's unable to open it. Violently, he drills more holes in the door ignoring the sound. Everyone will know there was a burglary, and his fingerprints will be all over the place because he is careless enough to drill without gloves at that moment.

Linc doesn't care.

_I'll never even make a professional criminal,_ he thinks bitterly. _A failure in everything._ Michael, Sofia and LJ would disagree, he knows. But Michael is not among the leaving, and Sofia and LJ are far away.

His effort and his frustration pays out because he is out of the toilet before anyone comes in, and soon he's back on the roof.

They run away, as they did so many times in the past years, and Mahone doesn't even dare ask him how it went for a very long time.

Too long time.

Mahone finally asks him, when they are half way back to Montana, using the least important roads they can find, in the third car they exchanged on the way.

"Her photograph, it caused the havoc," Mahone says.

"You knew?" Lincoln asks and the fury almost gets the better of him. It's lucky for Alex that Linc is the one driving. He's driving way too fast to get back to Sara on time, and he's not eager to end his life by driving off the road. If not, he'd beat the hell out of Mahone for what he made him do, in full knowledge of how it might turn.

"I was hoping I was wrong," Alex says and the words come out weak, almost like a confession. "Sometimes I'm so sorry when I'm right about things."

The humbleness of the former agent calms Linc somewhat down. "What does that mean? " he asks, trying to be rational, when he's not being good at that at all.

"One of the two," Mahone answers with caution. "Or Kelly Davis is one of the top class criminals in this world, that the inner circle of any President of the United States is monitoring carefully because you never know when they might pose a threat."

"Or?" Lincoln wants to hear it all and, wonders what can be worse.

It can always get worse.

"Or she is one of the President's best special agents entrusted with a special task involving national security. And in performing this task she has no need to abide by any laws…"

"Can she be both?" Lincoln asks.

"It's rare," Mahone says, "but not unheard of."

Lincoln is unable to tell which of the _three_ possibilities frightens him more.

He steps on it, and drives further. The car jerks forward, and the night shadows thicken.

Montana is still too way far away.

xxxxxxx

**The computer room used to watch Michael Scofield, very late at night**

Michael _Scofield_ stares at the computer screen where his previous life had unfolded in front of his frozen eyes.

_At least I'm not a murderer,_ he smiles without feeling any joy. He knows half of the stuff recorded by the media is an outright lie or at least facts made up bigger to appeal to the public, to reach record audiences in no time. The life he discovered doesn't feel like his own, yet the facts are irrefutable. _The leader of the Fox River Eight._

No, he hasn't murdered yet, but he had set murderers free. And Sara, _his wife,_ had murdered his mother to protect him.

_Why didn't you tell me?_ he asks her in his head. He asks it of himself too, and he cannot find an answer. He should crawl through the floors and seek her out, if she's in her office at all. After the night before he believes she would be.

But if she could not tell him, maybe there is a reason. Maybe she wants a new start, maybe the past is too difficult to mention, maybe seeing him alive is too much.

_Maybe she lost the child, and she's unable to tell me that._

Sara Scofield has disappeared from the media, and the computer cannot tell him if they have a boy or a girl or if they had a child at all. But the photograph of his grave calls him a father, too, among other things, so he must have become one after his disappearance…

_Maybe she doesn't want his child to meet his father._

When he thinks of that, he's unable to see her, he can't see her, he has to sleep first with the terrible thought. He doesn't want to hurt her by voicing his suspicions, yet they are there, and he's too selfish to get rid of them and just believe in her.

There's another place he can go to, using the floor heating, and another man who needs, and probably deserves his help.

The computer is helpful with that, at least, and the preparatory room for the special procedures shows clearly on the plans of St Agatha's. He retouches a little the drawings he has made earlier on his body, and gets on his way.

Xxxxxx

**Roger's room, ground floor of St Agatha's closed ward**

When Michael's head comes up through the floor of the room where they keep Roger, the strong man with greying hair immediately sits up on his bed, very similar to Michael's. The _chair_ is in the right hand corner, facing the open window. The smell of roses comes through it at night, sweet and sickening.

The chair is what Michael Scofield knows it to be, it's what they wanted to do to Lincoln, it's what they once put Lincoln in until, miraculously, his death sentence was postponed. There is a vague trace of dust from the chair to the door of the room, somewhat visible in the moonlight. As if it has been brought recently to the room. Michael stores the fact in his mind where he compiles all other unnecessary, often burdening data. He doesn't know what to make of it for the moment.

_Why do they need an electric chair for a brain surgery?_ he wonders. A ridiculous thought comes to mind: _Maybe I was in such chair to while Dr Davis operated me._

He has to stop thinking because the older man is awake, looking at Michael with blatant honesty in his eyes.

"I need to get you out of here," Michael informs Roger, without sparing the man a further, more detailed look, not even bothering to completely enter the room. He has wasted enough precious time that day on his personal heartaches and it's time to have a plan. "When is she going to operate on you?"

"In two days, I think," Roger says, "three at most. She has been a bit indisposed in the last two days, and she needs to make it look legal. Otherwise her employers will discontinue the money for her research and stop sending her patients."

"You mean," Michael says coldly, "she has to kill you in such a way that it looks that there could be a major breakthrough, in a sense that she might have some positive results with her next patient?"

"Something like that," Roger admits.

"And who's her next patient? T-Bag?" Michael asks furiously, both willing and unwilling for Theodore Bagwell to end his miserable life like Mr Morris did.

"T-Bag? Who's that?" Roger is genuinely surprised, and his wise-looking eyes narrow, almost changing hue. Michael is too tired to attribute any importance to the gesture but he registers it in the back of his mind together with the pattern and colour of Roger's curtains, and every last detail of his room. There is no obvious way Roger can go out through the window with the security features in place. The floor heating system is an option, but it will not get them to the point from where they can climb the roof. And pretend to be circus guys, both of them, in order to break out, if only for a few hours.

Michael's head starts spinning, and hurting. He hopes, no, he _prays_ , it's not cancer again. The only heritage he has from his mother. He hopes the headache is due exclusively to a too big amount of singular perceptions he's not yet been able to put in a coherent order, to get to a plan he needs. A plan to save Roger and to fool St Agatha, as he had once fooled Fox River.

"Has T-Bag been in the preparatory room?" Roger asks another question, more insistently than the first one.

"Never mind who he is, and I have no idea where he's been or not. I don't run this place, or its schedules. I've never heard of the preparatory room either, " Michael says. "We'll be leaving in two days. Let's hope that you're right about your operation date."

"Thank you," Roger says fervently, and there is no lie in his voice. There's no deliberate withholding of information from Michael, as both Fernando, his friend, and Sara, his wife, had done.

"I'll never be able to repay you the favor," Roger says and he has to mean it. People are mostly unable to lie that well.

His gratitude is genuine, and Michael feels a bit better about himself, hoping that he's right and that he's letting a good man out of prison. When he returns to his room, he's exhausted, and unable to proceed with checking the roof that night, but his mind cannot stop working, joining the many small puzzles together in a perfect, flawless plan. A coherent construct of his mind.

It's only before his eyes betray him, and in the minute before he falls asleep, that his desires can no longer be contained.

_I should have gone to you tonight,_ he thinks and hopes he may see her in his sleep, see the two of them together in his dreams that night.

He regrets being a coward.

And he misses Sara.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all who left a kudos on this story.


	14. The Roof

**In front of Mikey's School, just before lessons start.**

Sara successfully hides the traces of a sleepless night on her perfect face while driving Mikey to school. She finds that freshly washed hair helps her a great deal in her efforts. It's good that 5 year olds can glimpse only a bit of what is burdening the adults, she believes.

"Mom", Mikey says, "are you okay?"

Or maybe she is wrong.

"Sure," she says way more cheerfully than she would otherwise be able to at 8 am, "why?"

"Nothing," her son says, "it's just that yesterday morning your eyes were tired, but you looked so beautiful, and so happy, mom. And this morning you're... you're just you. Is it something I did, mom?"

The hurt and worry in her son's voice is so obvious and heart breaking. Conversely, it gives her force. In such a way that her next smile is genuine, and not forced.

"No, Mikey," she shakes her head, "you're a good boy and mommy loves you. Every day."

Mikey gives her a very tight hug. Squeezing her as only small kids can when they want to make a point. He clumsily kisses her under her chin while she is fighting to unclasp the seat belt to get him out of the car.

Luckily, they're not alone any more, and it makes it a lot easier to pretend.

Adelaide waves enthusiastically to Mikey through an open window, as Esperança is pulling their car, a black monster of some kind that Sara had not seen yet, right in front of Sara's modest vehicle.

"Hi," Sara says to Adelaide's mother and her indecision is resolved when the two kids hug each other and walk towards the school yard as best friends.

"Hi yourself," the huge woman says.

"Could you," Sara doesn't quite know how to ask, "could you..." She asks it anyway: "Could Mikey stay with you this weekend? I mean, could you pick him up after school and I'd pick him up on Sunday if that's ok. I really need to finish some stuff in the clinic, and I don't find time on normal working days..."

"Please," Sara adds as an afterthought, "I'd like to invite Adelaide to stay with us for the next weekend then! What do you think?" She gives a smile that is only half false to Esperança, and keeps her fingers crossed.

"Why not?" the large woman says. "The kids will love it!" The two women walk towards the school yard at their leisure, only to check that Mikey and Adelaide have arrived safely to the point where their class is gathering to start another school day.

Sara's shoulders relax visibly. "Thank you so much, Esperança! That's really sweet from the two of you," she says and goes back to her car. Her shoulders stiffen again when she thinks of what she will need to do.

Michael did not come to see her last night and in her opinion, this can only mean one thing.

Kelly Davis has done something about it.

And Sara is going to find out what.

xxxxxxx

**Garden of St Agatha's closed ward**

"I know," he tells Sucre when he sees him in the morning.

"Good, papi," Fernando says as if he doesn't give a damn about Michael's past, and the accepting sound of his voice is all Michael needs to believe him.

"Was I so... dangerous? Was I such a cold hearted dangerous man as they picture me to be?" he outlines his concern in too many too difficult words.

"You mean as they make you look in the newspapers and on TV to make people buy what they're selling?" Sucre asks and doesn't wait for an answer. "No, papi," he stammers, "you were much more terrible than anything they said about you..."

It takes a minute before Michael realizes that the weak words of his _friend_ are a joke. Now he can say Sucre is his friend. From all the stuff published about him he had seen in all kinds of sources, it follows that Sucre and Michael really were good friends.

They _are_ friends.

They both laugh and they would celebrate their rediscovered friendship in gestures, hugs, and painful taps on the back, if they were not aware that the black haired CEO of the clinic occasionally glances at them from several stories above.

"What's she doing here all the time now anyway?" Michael asks nervously.

"No idea," Sucre shrugs.

"Could you bring something that I need in here tomorrow?"

"No way, papi," Fernando says, "I'm sorry. That's one thing the guards check me for very well. They're very strict about it for some reason. It looks like it's some kind of house policy; nothing goes in, nothing goes out. I have to change and wear their clothes before I enter. I leave all my private stuff in the locker and pick it up on the way out. The shovel you got before is their gardening equipment."

"I don't need a shovel this time," Michael says aiming a blue stare to the building above. He glares so hard that after a while even Kelly is embarrassed, and she hides behind the open window upstairs. "Never mind," Michael says. "I'll think of something."

"Can I do something else, papi?"

"Yes," Michael says. "Take a walk around the clinic after your working hours and find a place where the trees are higher than the walls, sufficiently close to the roof of this wing, and thick enough that they can hold your weight, even if you climb higher up.

"Why the hell...?" Sucre asks and immediately presses a finger on his big mouth to prevent himself from cursing. Michael thinks he can hear him asking Jesus for forgiveness under the voice.

"Just do it," Michael says, blue eyes gazing down again. The way that they actually appear more green than blue from the reflection of the grassland around the two men. The sight is soothing. If Michael didn't know any better, St Agatha could indeed be a very successful and a rather beautiful health resort. "I'll tell you tomorrow what it's for, okay?"

"Okay, I guess," Fernando says, "I should go now. I was too much with you as it is. Got to do something about the roses again, see your other friend."

"Go ahead," Michael says.

Fernando leaves, yet after their talk, Michael feels way less alone.

Maybe, he just needs to break out of St Agatha for everything to be fine again.

xxxxx

**Ralph's Room**

The attendants talk and Ralph is pleased. The walls of St Agatha are nowhere near as thick as Kelly and her official employers would want him to believe. And a sound enhancing device hidden in his left ear helps him hear a great deal more than only the wall insufficiencies would allow.

"A short circuit," they say. "We brought the wrong guy to the procedure room, imagine. It's good we figured it on time. Folks who worked with Davis before say she doesn't tolerate mistakes. They say she put a bullet through her former lover's head when he didn't do his job properly."

Ralph laughs and knows that's exactly what Kelly did, and how pathetically she suffered over it later on because she had a soft spot for the guy she had so proficiently shot down. And she would do it again, faced with the same choice. Those kind of things are the reason why she can be valuable. And why he might not kill her immediately when he's out of the prison in two days. Only when he's had his fill of her.

For now he needs to find the who the wrong guy is, and he imagines it could be the person scheduled for the brain surgery after him. He fills in the form left by the anesthesiologist where he should enter the information on his health, necessary for the surgery awaiting him in three days. The man is his, and he uses the previously agreed code to hide a simple message: "Who's next?" he asks.

All that remains is waiting for an answer, maybe in the afternoon, maybe next morning.

There will be a reply for sure, because Ralph is known to have done even worse things than Kelly ever did to people who showed incompetence in working with him.

Incompetence can and will kill you, and it has to be very severely punished before it can do anything to you, he knows.

And whoever the next guy is, he will be leaving St Agatha with Ralph and Michael in two days even if he'll not make it very far from the woods. The life span of their third companion will be exactly as long as it takes for Ralph to get back _his_ plans. He hopes that the guy is stupid enough not to know what's in his possession. The three candidates he met in St Agatha all look dumb enough. Two who believe in Kelly and her revolutionary brain cancer heeling methods as complete morons, and an angry ugly southerner who is unknowingly a part of Ralph and Kelly's joint operation to manipulate Michael Scofield fragile state of mind after years spent in a vegetal state into doing exactly what they want him to do.

"A cute mushroom, that's what he is" _,_ Ralph thinks, "pity I'm not into boys".

It's still summer, and mushrooms are mainly picked up and eaten in autumn, he remembers from somewhere, not even knowing if he's right or not. Michael might not have even a mushroom lifespan left to live. Three days, maybe four, that how much he's got, depending on how the escape plan goes.

In his concentration on the great things to be done in the coming days, after long years of waiting, Ralph doesn't realize he mentioned his vegetal metaphors and spelled out his sexual preferences in a loud voice, and that the gardener is outside, listening.

Scissors continue shaping the white rose in total silence, and the well shaped amber colored hands of the Portorican worker are shivering.

xxxxx

**Kelly's office, after lunch**

Kelly is bending behind her desk to better fit another huge and obsolete yellow floral arrangement sent by Paul in the garbage can when she feels, more than she sees, a gun that is being pointed at her. She stands slowly up and spreads her hands to show that she is unarmed.

_It should work,_ she hopes, _for a while,_ wondering what's making Sara so mad at her. Michael's wife should be happy for the time being, if the short circuit two nights ago was any indication of the type of the night activities of Kelly's very special prisoner and a member of her staff.

Kelly almost chuckles when she realizes Sara is holding a gun in one hand, steady, not trembling at all, she has to give her that. Then again, Sara has already killed, and Kelly has no doubt she would do it again if it meant protecting her husband and their child. Kelly can almost identify with that attitude and respect it. But the reason for the sudden attack of humur is the fact that Sara is holding a simple metal fork in her other hand, offering it to Kelly.

"I need to go and see Michael," Sara says simply, fork still on offer.

"So that's how he switched off the recording when he went to you?" Kelly asks, ignoring the threat. She's been too well trained to feel any fear in a situation she is facing. And she had seen way worse things in Africa, and elsewhere…

"Actually," Sara says, "he had a spoon." She even laughs at her own joke, but the gun in her hands is firmly set on her target and her voice is not quavering.

"You'd better sit down and make yourself at home," Kelly says, pointing at the bright red designer couch, which hasn't had that many visitors in a while. "I'll order some snacks and then we can talk."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because I will do as you ask but only very late in the evening. If something like this would happen now, I would risk my position. And it's the only thing I have, at the moment."

Sara sits down, reluctantly, not knowing how to force Kelly's hand.

_Good,_ Kelly thought, _her husband never taught her his more sneaky methods of running around buildings…_

"What did you tell my husband?" Sara asks.

"Do you mean if I told him what you had ample opportunity to inform him about? Who he is, who he is to you and that kind of stuff?" Kelly gets angry at the other woman's lack of perspicacity. "I haven't seen him close up since he _returned_ to the clinic with you. And if I wanted to tell him, I had plenty of opportunity before you even knew he was alive. Telling him whatsoever and helping him to get back on track with his life is none of my business!"

"What is?" Sara asks, crossing her legs and leaning more comfortably on the soft red velvet, gun casually pointed at Kelly's head.

"Sorry," Kelly says, "but that's none of _your_ business." Still, she has to congratulate Sara on her outward mental composure, and not giving in to womanly wailing over the grievances of her heart which she has to have. Or she would not be in Kelly's office determined to see her husband.

"I hope you know another brain surgeon who is as good as you," Sara says calmly. "A _school_ colleague, maybe. I don't think I can miss at this distance."

Kelly can't control a chuckle that time. It comes out as a croaking of an exotic jungle bird. To appear moderately serious again, she picks up the phone, and orders some food. She calms her secretary down. She tells her all is in order, and explains she will be working late with Doctor Scofield. "Yes, all is fine," she reiterates for the fifth time, wondering what Sara Scofield did to frighten the assistant that much.

And everything is truly fine as it is. Because Kelly has another gun well within her reach, or a knife or two if she doesn't want to fire a bullet. She could probably still kill Sara faster than Michael's wife could even think of pulling the trigger. But that would spoil her plans. So she chitchats with the late Governor's daughter as they wait for the cover of darkness.

It is strangely pleasing.

It makes her forget the odor of the flowers withering in her garbage cans and Paul's strange words that can't be true at all.

Not after all the years.

xxxxxxxxxx

**Michael's Room, late at night**

It's not far from his room to the roof, not far at all. At this point of his endeavor it's only lucky that St Agatha wants to appear a bit like an old fashioned castle to the rich seeking its comfort and services. The façade is rich, historic. The surface of the walls is sculpted and decorated. It covers the concrete, the steel, and the security system underlying it.

If he goes barefoot he'll have a better grip, and he won't trigger any system warnings until he is on top. It's only good that fear of height is not on the list of his many insecurities, greatly increased in length by surfing on the Internet the night before.

He cautiously steps out of the window and searches for the uneven masonry, the unofficial way up. Soon to be Roger's and his way out. Climbing is tiresome and it takes him much longer than he would want. Half way up, he looks down, and considers abandoning it all. Flying like a bird. No one would patch him if he gave in to that urge, he knows. But Michaels is tenacious, and a good man might die if his plan doesn't work. Linc, his real brother, the one Michael already saved from prison, may be happy to know Michael lives, and he owes it to Lincoln to see this through.

And Sara didn't tell him anything, but she was… Well… he could never say she had not been _happy_ to see him for it would be a huge lie.

So he forgets his momentary insanity, he keeps on climbing up and he's almost there.

On the roof, the air is chilly, and it's only good he's sweaty from the effort so the cold is not that unpleasant. It will become so in a while, but until then, he has to move anyway. He scans all the details of the modern roof, a largely flat surface stretching freely behind the old fashioned cornice he had just climbed over, imitating old Greek or old Roman temples. The security up here is made of infrared radiation. The rays are crossing at regular intervals. He had seen the main pattern in the computer downstairs. They change it occasionally, but not every day, so for two or three days it should work, maybe for more. Two days is enough for he will not be there after that if all goes well.

He has to adjust his walking pattern not to trigger an alarm. If anyone could see him, they would laugh at him, for the course of his nightly exploration reminds of a ballet dancing, of sorts. And while he all of a sudden remembers fondly dancing with Sara at their wedding, without being able to recall the music at all, he's pretty sure that classical dance was never his thing.

Soon he knows there are at least two points where the trees are close enough to the roof of the closed ward, and he wonders which one he should choose. He decides to hear out Sucre's opinion in the morning, because he doesn't have to reach the decision immediately. He slumps in the square where there are no infrared beams according to his calculus when the chill gets less pleasant. Yet, far up, he feels oddly at ease, and he's reluctant to return to his room. He can just as well look around for a little bit more.

A faint sound comes from a hatch leading to the roof some twenty feet away, and if he didn't know any better he would say it's a man coming. The door of the hatch opens and it's much better than that.

It's _Sara._

And her hair smells not of summer, but of spring.

"Don't!" he yells at her, but she's already walking straight towards him ignoring the infrared pattern that _has_ to be there. Encouraged by her actions, he puts an arm through the beginning of the ray closest to him. Nothing happens.

He goes to her, unsure what he could tell her.

"Kelly switched off the security, she even suggested I might find you here. I know she didn't do it with any good intentions, but at least you are here…" she says. "We have…"

"Half an hour before it goes online again, I know…" he cuts her short and forgets the grudge he has against her, because her arms fold around his neck and the only thing he can do is hold her close, and inhale the scent of her hair.

"You didn't come last night and I thought she did something to you, that she operated on you again or something…"

"No," he says softly into her shoulder.

And than he can't keep it in any more, as much as he can't let go of her. _His wife._

"Sucre, he works here. He told me my last name. Last night, I spent it reading about myself. Do you have any idea how that felt? How I felt?"

Sara stiffens in his arms and the only thing she has to say is: "I love you."

It's oddly also the right thing to say, because whatever her reasons for not talking to him immediately, he thinks that he can bear them if what she just said is true.

"I missed you," she adds. "And when I saw you alive, I got lost in you. The things between us, the facts, they did not matter. I saw only you."

He thinks she may be crying because there is something warm and liquid on his grey T-shirt that doesn't smell like his own sweat after climbing.

Her body starts shaking uncontrollably in _sobs,_ making him embarrassed to the core that he had brought her to that state, as she utters, without him asking, the other most important thing he wanted to hear about. "The reason I didn't tell you about our son, or to Mikey about you for that matter, is that I'm still too afraid that something will go wrong. And that I will lose you again. I don't want Mikey to go through that. He's a smart kid."

"He's got a smart mother," Michael has to agree.

"Linc was here," she finishes lamely, "he was worried about me taking this job, but a few days ago he left somewhere with Alex before I could tell them about you. Kellerman is still here, but I don't trust him enough to tell him. He's got something going on with Kelly. Now, or in the past, who knows. God knows who he's working for right now… And Sucre, he knew, and he didn't tell me!"

Sara wipes her eyes and looks a little bit furious. He thinks he likes to see her that way for a change, even if it is her detached attitude, and the amazing generosity hidden behind it, that he has learned to love. He can almost remember her in Fox River, and he hopes that one day he would, remember, not only read about their transgressions, or hear it from her. Even if on the roof of St Agatha's hearing about his life from Sara sounds like a much better idea than reading about it.

"Listen," he says, "we have little time left."

Slowly, she gets attentive and she listens.

"I need rope," he says, "or wire," he details, "like what they use in circus to walk on."

He hates it, but she will have to help him, again. "I need it by tomorrow. Fernando, he can't do it. They are checking him. But you might. Long enough to reach those trees over there," he shows her the destination he has in mind. "Twice that much."

He sees the fear in her eyes.

"Trust me," he says, "I have no intention of dying on you for the second time."

"Okay," she says after a while, but he can see she's not convinced.

"You want to see my room?" he asks with the carelessness he doesn't feel, but it helps to get her moving. They need to go down through the hatch in a few minutes they still have left. He hopes he can find the way fast enough.

Because he doesn't really think that gliding down the façade is an option for Sara.

"Your cell, you mean?"

"What's the difference?" he jokes further and he can almost see her smile.

"Wait," she says, "just a second," she adds. "We didn't say hello properly."

With that she grasps the back of his head with both hands, and invades his face with her warmth. Her smile melts on his lips as his arms lift her only so slightly from the ground.

It's more than a second, Michael's mind says, working overtime as usual, never stopping to make calculations, necessary or not. It's much more than a second but the hell if it counts.

"Hello," he tells her when she withdraws only so gently, letting him see clearly it's not what she wants at all. He admires how she can be much more rational than he is, in some situations, in any case.

They have less time now to arrive to his room, but they will make it, he knows. Just like together, they have more chance of making it out of St Agatha's alive.

They do make it, to his room, at least. When he pulls the door open, the sterile medical bed in which he woke up weeks ago, the ugly contraption he hates from the bottom of his heart, suddenly looks like the most appealing and comfortable place to be in the whole wide world.

"They'll find me here in the morning," she objects.

"So what?" he contradicts her. "There's nothing wrong they can find with your brains. Kelly will be forced to fire you for misconduct. Her decision will take effect immediately. You will leave the clinic under some pretext, and return later on to pick up your belongings as is your right. Then, you'll leave what I need in your office, that's all."

"That easy?" she asks, unconvinced.

"That easy," he confirms, wishing he was able to believe his own words.


	15. The Unwanted Companion

**Michael's Room, St Agatha, at the time for breakfast**

When Sara opens her eyes, the sunlight is creeping under the door, and behind the blinds firmly drawn over the windows. An arm is wrapped around her middle, and a well shaped muscled shoulder is not far away from her drowsy face.

It's a miracle of sorts.

They barely fit in the state of the art hospital bed they are sharing, but it's still more comfortable than a similar cot in the infirmary. She could just wake up like that every morning, and she finds that she wouldn't mind.

When she blinks to open her eyes further, there are people in the room. Kelly's face is puzzled, too pale under short black prickly hair standing on edge, and genuinely _frightened._ The two male attendants she had brought with her stare at the couple on the bed with utmost boredom, making Sara only so slightly self-conscious.

"I truly regret this, Sara," Kelly says, "you know that you don't leave me any other choice. I am terminating your contract and you have to leave the clinic."

"That would be Mrs Scofield to you," Sara replies, stretching lazily, not bothering to hide her state of undress, or to get up for that matter. Michael is still sleeping and she feels fine just where she is, public notwithstanding. "And don't worry, I will get myself a lawyer as soon as I'm out of here. Something can and has to be done about this entire mess in our law abiding country."

"I can assure you that the business I conduct here is perfectly legal, _Mrs Scofield,_ " Kelly underlines with malice. "Your former associate and perhaps your friend, Mr Mahone, he has already tried hard and he didn't find anything."

"Are we not permitted… conjugals?" Michael says wearily all of a sudden, stirring from his sleep. "That was okay even in Fox River. And she _is_ my wife."

"Not in this institution, I'm afraid," Kelly says and sighs, the look on her face inscrutable, and if Sara knows _anything_ about reading people, more afraid than before. This conversely gives Sara the necessary force to proceed. It is with difficulty and regret that she disentangles herself from her husband and dresses up. _Only one more day,_ she tries to tell herself, _you'll bring the stuff he needs and he will be out tonight with that man he doesn't want to leave behind. This is only a hospital, after all, not a prison. It shouldn't be that difficult to escape from it._

"I don't suppose that you'd believe me if I told you that your husband's health condition is so delicate after the years he spent in a coma that such… visits… may lead to an unwanted deterioration of his precarious body equilibrium," Kelly tries being civil with them, but it doesn't work, not really. Not after everything they have been through together.

"No," Sara says calmly.

"What condition?" Michael asks in all innocence as if he had never been diagnosed with brain cancer to start with, or let himself be hit by a deadly electric blast to save his wife from prison.

"Can I return later this morning to collect my possessions?" Sara asks flatly, trying to sound defeated, and not too hopeful or jittery. Luckily, Kelly is not looking at her at that moment, so she should not be able to see through Sara's thoughts and intentions.

Kelly Davis is staring at the floor, as if the artificial color of it hides a great secret or a not yet comprehended beauty. St Agatha's CEO nods gravely at the two attendants who then immediately enter into competition in who will be faster in showing Sara the door.

When the door slams behind her, Sara is relieved. So far the things are going according to Michael's plan. She can't help but wonder if their luck will hold.

It has never happened before.

**Garden of the closed ward of St Agatha, a bit later on**

When Michael is allowed in the garden, for which he is grateful, after his latest transgression of the house rules in St Agatha, Roger talks with T-Bag as if they were best friends. The other two patients are gone, and Michael wonders where they might be.

He wonders even more what has come into Kelly to let Roger out of his confinement. Until he notices that at least 20 attendants supervise the two men talking from various corners blow, and windows above. It's the largest amount of guards disguised as medical staff that Michael has seen since he woke up in St Agatha. Deployed all over to make sure that Roger is not going anywhere.

_Not yet,_ Michael thinks with superiority, _but pretty soon he will. we will._

"My last day for a walk in the full possession of my mental capacities," Roger says to Michael when he approaches, gingerly, "the procedure will be done tomorrow morning. Dr Davis is known to be generous at times."

"Yeah," Michaels says thinking how _no, it will not be done. Not as long as I've got anything to do with it._

"Mr Bagwell here," Roger says, informatively, "he is next in line."

"Could we," Roger stutters then, "could it be that…?"

And Michael closes his eyes, knowing what is being asked of him. _Not again,_ he despairs. Roger, a good man, an innocent man like Lincoln, is pleading him to break out a known criminal and an insane person out of St Agatha's.

"Please," Roger says, and Michael is somewhat moved against his will.

"Please," T-Bag repeats, and he's actually sounding sincere. But then again, it's maybe not the first time he seems a bit repented since Michael has known him, and it has never been the case.

"No," Michael says firmly, "I don't know what the two of you are talking about."

"In that case," Roger says stoically, staring at the pocket of T-Bag's shirt for a reason Michael cannot fathom, but his senses register it anyway, as all the other almost always useless information burdening his too fast working brain. The pocket is not empty, but Michael cannot discern what is in it. A crumpled piece of paper, perhaps, or a cigarette ending, if T-Bag managed to smuggle those in the other wise clinically pristine environment of St Agatha.

"I have made my peace," Roger says, and his words sound like a prayer. "Do not come looking for me any further, my friend. I am grateful for all your advice, but I'll not take any of it. Let's say good bye while I'm still myself, not a human ruin, or a discarded corpse."

The sentence cements Michael's belief in Roger's goodness, which can only amount to blindness in the case of T-Bag. Some people do not deserve help. Michael thought initially like Roger, he thought that all people deserved help, at times, until he learned the hard way that it was not the case.

"I may think about what needs to be done," he says, still uncertain of what he will do. Both Roger and T-Bag flush him a bright smile, one honest and straightforward, and one crooked and begging at the same time.

After lunch, Michael becomes besieged with doubts concerning Roger. _What if he's not who he says to be? What if he's another T-Bag or worse?_

He's eavesdropping until he believes that both of the attendants watching him through the walls go for well deserved lunch. He has already observed the routine of how they have stopped going one by one weeks ago, seeing how Michaels was not as dangerous as their boss must have told them. A wolf in a skin of a lamb.

_You are wrong,_ he thinks, _I am dangerous. Just not for you._

Less than 10 minutes with the computer, his new best friend in St Agatha's is more than enough. There is enough information on Roger on the web that if at least some of it is correct, the man is truly a person who deserves help. A defendant of human rights in all troubled areas of the world Michael has barely heard about. He can only recall from the news reports he sporadically followed that the overall causes were just, validated as such by recent history. From South Africa to East Timor, you name it. He is not Ghandi, not by far, but he did things of worth and renown in his rather long life and career.

Michael wonders which of the achievements listed may have displeased someone powerful enough in the governmental circles to the point to imprison Roger and make him suffer an illicit medical experiment to hinder his activism. From the perverted mind of at least some of the government agents Michael was (un)fortunate to deal with in his former life, it seems so logical that this could be his case. His trust in justice was completely turned upside down and shattered by his family experiences and his own.

Knowing it doesn't ease Michael's overwhelming sense of guilt - in trying to set things right, he has done many things wrong - he helped people who did not deserve it, and he's about to do it _again_. Because he can't let Roger rot in St Agatha, murdered or brought into a vegetative state. He can't let a man like Roger sacrifice his life for a scum like T-Bag.

_Maybe I should shoot T-Bag when we are out to even the situation,_ he thinks. _I haven't killed anyone yet, have I?_

_No you didn't,_ he remembers with an even greater guilt. _But others killed for you._ Sara, pulling the trigger at his own mother to save him. _Isn't it just the same?_

He shivers at the thought, and he doesn't think he will be able to shoot anyone. Even if a weapon is placed in his hands and he can't miss. Even if T-Bag of all people may deserve to die, may the god have mercy on his soul. This way or that way, Michael doesn't have it in him to take a life of another human being.

It's not his place.

Unfortunately, there is no information publicly available about St Agatha's real business or any of that. Only commercials for the rich looking for a vacation health trip in Montana which is supposed to help their mental well-being. Michael's time is up, and there's no time for further searches. He obediently returns to his room well before the guards watching him are back.

He breathes deeply, waiting for the evening, and for an opportune moment to retrieve the material he's needing from Sara's office.

It's only then that he realizes he hadn't seen Sucre that day, at all, and Fernando was supposed to tell him which side of the roof was better to attempt getting out.

It's a first shadow of a gnawing doubt in his otherwise perfect plan. _Adapt, adjust, change,_ he thinks nervously, scanning his room for unnecessary details.

Does Kelly suspect something?

Does she know of his timing?

Did she fire Sucre as well?

He focuses on the stains on the walls, and empties his mind of insecurities.

There is no turning back and he will know soon enough.

**Later in Helena, Montana, and in Sara's former office in St Agatha**

Buying wire is easier than she thought. There is a large shop selling climbing equipment on the outskirts of the city, and they sell her a full set of good quality ropes too, as the most essential item for the sport, they tell her.

She only needs some rope according to Michael's instructions, but she lets herself be convinced so that the saleswoman stops talking. Forgetting the prudence of their time on the run, she pays by credit card instead of getting cash first.

Driving back to the clinic with the purchases, she calls Esperança to check if little Mikey is doing fine on his weekend outing. They are not answering. She gives up trying for the moment because, what, it's still quite early in the morning and the kids may be sleeping if they were allowed to play late the night before. She smiles when she thinks of her son and how soon, so very soon, he might finally meet his father.

She thinks she might drive to over there, to Esperança's place, when she's done at St Agatha's to tell Mikey the good news.

Hiding climbing equipment in her former office is also way easier than she thought. The clinic is strangely empty, as if everyone took a weekend off, the doctors and the patients.

She leaves the wire, and the apparel necessary to launch the rope to a desired distance, in the now empty closet which used to contain her belongings. There is, however, a problem. The expensive good quality rope she was sold doesn't fit in there. Not in its entirety. She has a way bigger quantity than Michael ever needed. Frightened to take it back out with her, certain that she is being watched, even if she can't see anyone in her immediate surroundings, she first deposits the length Michael specified inside the closet. Carefully, she drops the extra quantity under the floor, a much larger one than what is stored next to the wire, in the passage leading to the wing they keep her husband in. The package sinks down, coiling slightly around the heating pipes.

She is lucky that she can close the floor hatch after she does that.

She sees no one when she leaves the clinic again. The place is eerily empty and it doesn't bode well. Wishing to stop the worry growing in her mind, she speeds down the mountain, and she's lucky to reach the bottom in one piece. As she continues driving on a more normal road, several helicopters, military in looks, fly ominously over, gliding in the direction of St Agatha.

Sara grips the wheel and hopes they are flying somewhere else.

There's nothing more she can do.

**Later, St Agatha's, former Sara's office**

"Seal it," Kelly commands to the house keeping technicians, pointing at the hatch leading to the floor heating.

Her promise to Michael does no longer hold, and she should have done it before, promise or not. But now all the cards are in the open, and she has to play serious in not letting Roger escape to satisfy her true employers. She doesn't know what she hopes will happen in the end and she wants to quench all hopes of positive outcome in her heart. For her, there is only one possible result if all goes as she planned it, but she chooses not to think about it. She wonders what Paul will think of her, if anything, when he hears the news.

Adelaide is gone to safety with Esperança and that is the most important thing for Kelly. Also, Michael's son is with them, and she wonders what Sara will do when she discovers it. She's bound to discover it pretty soon, Kelly thinks. _She might bang her head to the wall,_ she ponders with irony. What she truly hopes for is that Sara will drive away from Helena in pursuit of her boy. _It would be for the best_ , Kelly concludes cynically. _Mrs Scofield… It's so easy to occupy the moral high grounds as someone's wife._

Kelly never got married, and she never will.

The technicians meanwhile search the room and take away the climbing gear Sara had stored in her closet, under Kelly's look of stern approval. When the door of Sara's former office is also sealed, Kelly walks to her own office, and sinks deeply into the red couch, being so free about it for the first time since she had ordered that piece of furniture.

She uses the moment to check all the important things in her own mind some people would call brilliant. _And some wicked,_ she remembers with sadness.

The cavalry has arrived. All non essential staff has been sent home for the weekend. The few who showed up despite notice not to do so were refused entry, including Michael's Portorican friend, Fernando Sucre. All well-paying patients seeking the peace of mind in St Agatha have been evacuated after breakfast in the most luxurious transport she could afford, as were the two patients waiting for experimental brain surgery. The evacuation was done with the weak explanation that compulsory works regarding fire alarms had to take place during the weekend. It worked good enough, for most, that is. And she had made enough money in the last years to sustain the loss of those few who felt outraged and who would cancel their stay in her clinic as a consequence of being disturbed in their morning walk on the grass.

It's only Kelly, non medical staff, and the military.

And it's going to be a long night.

Kelly pours herself a glass of cognac, as she wonders what exactly Michael intends to do. Having seen the ropes, she has at least an idea. She knows with some certainty that it might include climbing.

Only one glass will do. Her head has to remain clear, and her hands steady

Shooting a firearm is, after all, what she does best, with the right intent. And with the same precision that she wields her surgical knife.

**Sara, driving away from the clinic**

Suddenly, nothing can stop the worry in Sara's heart. She calls Esperança again, but there is no answer. She drives to their house. She wonders why she never bothered to go inside the first time she brought Michael there. She should have looked around instead of being favorably impressed by the neatness of the premises. Way neater than her own big house where she used to live with her late father. She realizes more than ever that she has no idea who Esperança is or who her daughter is, for that matter. She never bothered to find out because they seemed nice, and Mikey liked them.

The truth is worse than she thinks.

The house Mikey should be in looks equally abandoned as St Agatha did moments ago. The garden is lonely, the hydrangeas don't look watered. There is no one. No car in the yard or in front. The fence is locked. There's no dog barking.

_Where are they?_ she wonders as she parks her own car in front of the door and walks to the fence. There, the letters dance in front of her hazel eyes as the terrible truth reveals herself.

The owner's name is on the mailbox, clearly visible. It's not Esperança or anything similar. She wonders how she has never noticed it before, she should have seen it immediately. She should have checked…

The mailbox reads, in curved letters, _Kelly S. Davis._

Extremely frightened, Sara returns home and types Kelly's name in the computer Mikey mostly uses for playing games, looking for any hints about Davis' private life.

The results are staggering and she curses herself for stupid for not even doing that before. She feels like a dinosaur born in some other era, unable to live by the most simple of the demands of the present day, and get properly informed about things and people.

It turns out that Ms Davis has spent several years of her life in Africa, doing voluntary medical work with children, disseminating vaccinations and similar. Even teaching in primary schools. Knowing Kelly as she knows her by that moment, Sara wonders if her volunteering included medical experiments on children and of what kind. She strongly suspects that it did.

"Yes," the familiar voice says behind Sara's back, startling her, until she remembers all the unwanted guests who have recently occupied her house. "She brought an adoptive daughter from over there. Moçambique, I think," Paul Kellerman says quietly, trying hard to be polite after Sara had never heard him enter. "And I bet that not all she has done is recorded in these civil society ramblings you're reading. Kelly is capable of anything."

_At least he's not putting my head under the crane this time,_ Sara thinks bitterly.

"She has Michael," Sara says, suddenly needing to confide in someone, anyone. Linc is not there, and she has no idea where Sucre is.

Her son has been kidnapped, and her husband is in danger. She will have to do with Paul.

"What?" Paul asks, not believing his ears.

"That woman, Kelly… She has Michaels imprisoned in her hospital," Sara says, "he intends to break out tonight with another prisoner who is important to Davis. And a fat black woman who takes care of Adelaide, Kelly's adoptive daughter, has kidnapped my son. We have to do something," she looks at Paul with the eyes watering under mounting pressure.

"How does Michael intend to go out of there if I may ask?" Paul inquires with cold concentration, as calm as only a former murderer can be in front of the discovery he had never expected, Sara presumes. "The place is better guarded than Alcatraz used to be although this is not visible to untrained eyes."

Sara's eyes water further when he says that. _I should have known,_ she thinks, wiping carefully her right eye, than her left.

She will not give into her feelings. There will always be a time to cry later. For now, they might still be able to do something if they get going.

"I don't know," Sara admits her ignorance about her husband's exact intentions, "but it may involve rock climbing."


	16. Before

**In front of St Agatha's**

Sucre knows he's got no time to loose when they don't let him to work in the clinic that day. He still hangs around for a few hours just in case that they will change their mind. When they don't, he gets afraid for the first time since he followed Sara to Montana. What he sees, puts him further on edge. All patients leave the hospital like rats abandoning the sinking ship in old stories about the pirates and the conquerors. Several discreet groups of armed men move in, surreptitiously. Whatever Michael is up to has made the people who pull the power strings behind the sinister clinic very nervous, and they are trying their best to prevent him.

 _Ropes, wires,_ he remembers, _climbing. It must be a nice sport if you like it_. He already knows that the trees are higher and stronger on the south side of the roof of St Agatha's ward where they are keeping Michael, but he has no way of telling that to him. _He's smart,_ Fernando tries to console himself, _he'll figure that out without my help._

He's lucky, and he doesn't forget to say a short prayer to the baby Jesus for that, because his car doesn't break for real from the excess of speed he's pushing it to reach, in order to arrive back to Helena before the closing hours of the shops. He'll only know weeks later that he went to the same place as Sara. And luckily for all, Fernando doesn't trust payment cards. There is enough cash for the rainy weather sewn under the back seat of his car in a way his grandmother may have hidden dollars from his grandfather in the thick mattress of her bed. (He doesn't actually know if she did that but he thinks she may have.)

The kind talkative lady sells him all kinds of stuff he never saw in his life, even hitches by which a climber can be attached to the ropes and wires, and some things to launch ropes far up if needed. Michael never asked for those, but Sucre concludes that more things can't hurt anyone. It all fits neatly in the back of the car, and when the trunk door is safely closed, the bulk is not too big to attract anyone's undue attention. Once he is out of the shop, his cash is almost gone, but at least he's trying to do something to help his best friend.

To help Michael survive whoever is abusing him now, and for whatever reason.

The days are long in summer.

Waiting for the rest of the day is the most difficult thing Fernando has done in the past five years. Michael will not move before dark, Sucre knows; it's the only natural shelter he will get. Parked in the woods on the side of the road leading up to St Agatha's, he notices helicopters and a few more vehicles with armed men flying or driving up. There're no teams with dogs as far as he can tell.

He doesn't know exactly why, but he's pretty damn sure it's a good thing. It was easier to avoid people than dogs after Fox River. Still, there's no way to tell if it'll be so once more, and the helicopters don't look friendly at all.

At dusk, he retrieves the old-fashioned gun too, hidden under the driver's seat. The model is too obsolete to be used in street robberies and he's not even sure if it works. He hopes he won't need it, except maybe to threaten someone, and he doesn't really know how to use it, not very professionally anyway. Waving a gun like an idiot brought him to prison once, and he hopes it won't happen again.

And if it does, he hopes he'll share a cell with Michael again.

That way they won't stay in it for very long.

xxxxxxx

**Michael's room, St Agatha**

On the day he's about to break from St Agatha's with Roger and T-Bag, there is no lunch served. It's the first sign of alarm. The windows to his room are being blinded and sealed from the outside, so that he can't look out or over the walls to check what the hell is going on. He already suspected that the mechanism installed within the frame hinges could be used for something like that, and now he's proven to be correct. Michael sighs. There are times when he would wish to be wrong in such assumptions.

He never is.

When dusk comes, slower than he would wish, he doesn't dare to break into the watching room as it has become his habit. Base instincts tell him it's not safe, and for once he's listening to those, and not to the siren's call of his overdeveloped perception abilities. The primitive pen and pencil drawings of St Agatha's blueprints on his body, which he did the first time he could, will have to do. He checks the latest drawing on his thigh, where he registered the path where T-Bag was taken by the attendants when Roger made it clear he would not leave St Agatha's without him.

Even so, everything is wrong since the end of afternoon, and the unease starts swimming in his guts. The plan will not work with too many unknown variables, he knows, and there's not enough time to explore all the new changes to fill them in. So he focuses on the important while his stomach rumbles, used to be fed well, and on time, in his latest captivity. _Maybe that's Kelly's way to get whatever she is after,_ he thinks, knowing that a little bit of food deprivation is nowhere near enough to stop him. He's going back to his wife, and he's taking a good man out where no one can hurt him. As they had wanted to hurt Linc, his older brother.

So he crawls to Sara's former office like a madman as soon as he thinks it's late enough. He knows the way by heart and needs no light. He's not even as surprised as he should be to see the hatch sealed from the top. He sits under it and steels himself to remain calm. There will be no climbing equipment. Or will it? He stands up, feeling something under his behind, and he notices he was seated on a portion of coiled rope. It's not nearly enough for what he needs to do, but it's so much better than nothing at all. He purposefully refuses to think if this change of circumstances means that something has happened to Sara or to his son. He will do with what he has to, and soon he'll be out there to help her, help them, whatever it is that is going on.

 _There will be more elements of a real circus performance tonight than I've ever planned,_ he thinks when he's back to his room, smiling for no one, because there's no one there who can see him, methodically unscrewing a metal bar on the side of his bed, with the help of the faithful spoon he's been using for all kinds of _situations_ in St Agatha's so far _,_ and a freshly broken handle of one of the windows. Both things are apt to be used as some sort of a screwdriver. Besides, it's not likely that his invisible guards can see he's been ruining their window frames when they closed him from the outside, and abandoned their watching post next door.

_We should let T-Bag go first. It'll be no big issue if he takes the fall… We need Roger's sheets as well…_

It's not nice to think as Michael does, but he can't help it. He doesn't think he'll do it though. He won't let T-Bag go out first. Roger should go first if they want the plan to work out properly.

He tightens the loose metal bar on his back with the rope he has and all the bed linen he'll never sleep on anymore. It's a bit less than five foot long, several inches thick, rounded, and not very heavy. _New materials,_ he thinks, glad for the advances in building technology which made it possible that his hospital bed would not made of old fashioned iron or steel. He wouldn't be able to unscrew or carry a bar like that, and much less use it to help their escape in case of dire necessity as if it was a wooden pole. An end of one of his light blue sheets ends up fastened across his chest and shoulders, not too far from his face. When he closes his eyes to contemplate his next move, to gain a temporary relief from his external senses working overtime, he wants to believe that the wrinkled blue cotton smells of Sara.

It's easier to do what he needs to do that way.

T-Bag's room is not very far and he has to get going.

xxxxxx

Linc will remember later how they were lucky to run into Sara and Kellerman in front of Sara's rented house in Montana, just before they would both get in Sara's car and drive away. Because if what Alex and Linc found out about Kelly is anything to go by, the house where they all recklessly stayed, without taking _any_ precautions, may well be wired or watched. And they don't want anyone to listen in on the conversation they are having just then.

"She's got Michael," Kellerman states the matter without embellishments of any kind. "Kelly Davis does." Linc's eyes open wide, and his mouth follows suit when Sara completes the former murderer's thought.

"And Mikey, too."

"What?" Mahone says, never forgetting the son he had lost, the unnatural pain of a parent who survived his child always fresh and never too far from the surface.

"I have a plan," Kellerman says.

He's nowhere near as smart as Michael, but Michael is not there, and they have to think of something. _He's alive, he's alive, he's alive,_ Lincoln realizes, trying to concentrate in vain on what they should do.

"Michael is alive," he says, and grins from ear to ear when he sees Sara smiling, as he had not seen her smile since her wedding day.

"We don't have time for mistakes," Mahone interrupts the moment and asks Kellerman. "Are you sure he'll try to get out over the roof?"

"Why else would he ask Sara to get him climbing equipment?"

"Well he could go down one of the walls," Linc suggests.

"And where is Sucre?" Kellerman says impatiently. "Does anyone have any idea? It's past his working hours, he should have been back. Especially if they kicked out everyone from a clinic as I suspect Kelly would do as a typical double agent. She must be in charge of the government secret operation to do whatever they are doing in St Agatha's, and simultaneously act as a highly killed criminal trying to make some profitable dirty deal for herself on the side…"

"I don't know," Sara says, and she sits on the street, finally appearing broken under the weight of all recent discoveries. "But I hope he's with Michael."

"So do I", Linc says and he means it. Ever since Fox River, Sucre was indispensable for the success of all Michael's planning and plotting.

They all fit in the same car, and they all have guns, Linc realizes, feeling uneasy in the new situation. He's driving slowly up to the clinic. With no lights on, he can barely see the road between the ever higher trees. Mahone's head is stuck out through one of the back windows. He's observing the markings of the helicopters flying low, almost on the top of the car.

"There's something wrong with one of these choppers," Alex says finally, with an instinct of a former agent, more infallible than the Pope.

"Yeah?" Kellerman asks with interest.

"The markings are slightly different, the construction, the wings, the tail," Mahone says, "I can't be too sure but it doesn't fit. It doesn't add to the governmental style of working."

"Might be Kelly's personal transport, a way out of the bad situation," Paul says, "it wouldn't surprise me."

"Maybe we should take that one out," Alex says, "decommission it, somehow. There's still some time, and we have no idea where Michael is."

"You do that," Sara says to all three men, "but I'm going to the walls of the clinic. It'll be either from the north or from the south side, where the roof comes close enough to the forest to use the trees as a way down. If he can cross the roof and fool the security system on the parapets and the entire outer wall.

Linc becomes overwhelmed by a sensation of peace.

If there's one thing he's sure of, it's this; Michael, his brother, can fool any security system.

For as long as it takes.

xxxxxx

**Roger's Room (cell)**

Roger is pacing victoriously up an down, blocked in his cell, registering the sounds of St Agatha's being evacuated from the outside, confirming the blissful reality in his sick mind.

 _I'm finally leaving,_ he thinks, and he'd scream it out loud, if he wasn't aware that the recording equipment in his cell is still working, even if there's no one listening to the materials right then, St Agatha's being in a state of special secure lockdown.

The only thing that remains is to wait for Michael and Mr Bagwell to come and get him.

He hopes that Bagwell will not have a change of clothes for breaking out. So that Roger doesn't have to send him back to his room under some pretext and loose precious time, if the card he wants above all is no longer in his dirty shirt pocket. _Essence,_ he knows, _the time is of essence…_

Then again, T-Bag doesn't strike Roger as one who's very much into hygiene, especially when he's under so much stress, so there's no reason to worry that it'll be the case.

He wonders which way they will go. Through the open wing of the clinic, down the wall, under the walls, above them? He trusts Michael fully on that.

It matters not, as long as he's out that night with the plans destined for North Korea. His transport is on the way, innocuously appearing as one of the governmental special aircrafts dispatched to St Agatha's to prevent him, Roger, from leaving.

He has no weapon, but he can kill, maim or incapacitate with bare hands if he has to.

 _Soon I will have my name back,_ he thinks. _Roger, that horrible people loving person, will die for good._

xxxxx

**Kelly's Office, that evening**

A little bit before everyone is gone, as soon se she hears her secretary closing the door behind her, and the sound of too high heels disappearing down the corridor, Kelly dresses for the mission she now has in mind, grateful that she has never indulged herself in letting her hair grow in the past years. Or neglected the training her body needs for situations as the one that is presenting itself at that moment.

She hasn't used her black tight suit since parachuting in Africa, years ago, but it's the best she can do now. It's thin, and it fits her like second skin, from top to toe. Also, the ancient special forces attire feels like home, and it makes her feel ten years younger on the inside. The woman she used to be. Able to win at all costs. Somehow she knows that the helicopters will not find Michael and Roger with great ease, as they _should._ After all, she's partially responsible for that probability herself.

So it leaves her with only one reasonable course of action, the one she expected from the very beginning of her years long stunt in St Agatha's. If she wants those plans _and_ Roger before he truly runs away, she has to catch both herself. She picks up two weapons from her collection. A middle size sniper rifle in its casing, _easy to use, easy to compose_ , she mentally rereads the manual. And a more portable standard gun she intends to strap on herself, wondering how many shots she will fire that night.

 _As little as possible,_ she thinks while fastening the smaller weapon safely on her body. _And as many as needed._ In a dim light of her office, she is the perfect thief, a skinny black shadow moving with lethal stealth and precision.

 _The roof,_ she knows, or she thinks he does. Michael would not be scouting it the night before, if it wasn't a part of his blossoming plan to escape. _Not even in his suffering over Sara's silence, as a hiding place for the torment of his soul._ Men were simply not that romantic, hurt or not, Kelly has learned it the hard way, long time ago.

The climbing equipment Kelly had graciously disposed of as garbage is a mute witness of the fact that his chosen route would go over the roof. She was more than lucky that Sara paid by card, the transaction immediately forwarded to Kelly's PC, as about any other purchase Michael's wife did in Montana since she arrived.

Michael will have to do with less on his way out.

Kelly has no doubt that he _will_ think of something, but she fervently hopes that the forceful change of plans may give her the strategic advantage over him and Roger she so desperately needs.

Together, Ralph (Roger, whatever) and Michael are smarter than she is.

And she never liked it when the odds were that way.

However, they might both underestimate her determination to get those plans, and that, that could be just enough. Just enough.

Still, the roof of St Agatha's is large and looming, and it will take dancing skills she never possessed in great deal, to walk through the labyrinth of infrared beams without triggering the alarm. And she will not use her personal card to override it as she did with Sara for two equally important reasons: her governmental employers will see that she did it on two consecutive days, and it is still her best chance to find Michael and Roger first, if they disrupt it, even for a brief second

Her stomach makes a menacing sound. If Michael didn't have lunch, she hasn't eaten since the day before. Water is the only thing she allows herself when she wants her body to function as a weapon.

The thought of not surviving the latest operation she's planning is a fleeting constant in the back of her mind, not bothering her as much as it should. If she doesn't, it's only good. At least she'll not have to put up with Roger's advances towards her any more. They were awful enough as far as they went, and as much as she'd been forced or decided to oblige him, to avoid worse aspects of copulation, no doubt. But it's not acceptable to go down without getting those plans first. So she has another glass of water and goes to the toilet for the last time that evening.

With the last light of the day, Kelly Davis is no more than a figure in black, a terror on the loose in St Agatha, responding to no one, owing her allegiance to no one but herself, searching for the runaway prisoners and plans for nuclear development worth billions of dollars.

She's ready.

God help any of them if she finds them first.

xxxxxx

**T-Bag's Room (cell)**

Theodore Bagwell's stomach churns when the windows of his cell are sealed. Lunch is not served and as the day goes by, sinking into darkness, he becomes completely sure that both his new friends and old enemies have abandoned him as it has happened so many times before. They will leave poor old T-Bag to rot in there, waiting for his twisted brain to be washed out violently, cut out open by means of a surgical knife.

"Please," he prays out loud, but he doesn't know to whom, cold sweat popping out on his clammy forehead. He fingers the card in the pocket of his shirt. He starts banging the walls of his cell, one of them, all of them, hoping some of the guards are watching him go crazy. He's showing the card he has, plain for all to see, to any invisible camera that may be filming.

He hopes that the tiny thing he stole from the special room may be important enough to someone, so they might come and get him, transfer him to Fox River Again, or to a different prison, he doesn't care, anywhere at all. As long as he's out of the inofficial death row. As long as they would let him live, and keep his brains intact, abnormal as they might be. He would find sweethearts again, among the young and uncorrupted meat coming to do their time in any prison in America.

Or he would swear a sincere vow of celibacy at that moment, if only someone would come and get him out of there. Before it's too late and he gets turned into a mushroom, unaware of his own existence.

A plant on Kelly Davis' table.

But the hospital is silent, and no one reacts to his actions. Neither to his provocations, nor to his words. No once cares for T-Bag or what he might have on offer one way or the other.

No one ever did.

The captivity of negativity is the only thing left.


	17. Walking on Moonshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chapter mostly about Michael, this one

 

**St Agatha's, somewhere in the corridors in front of Michael's room (cell)**

When Michael is finally out in the corridors, heading to T-Bag's room, there's a mild cracking sound he doesn't like. Maybe it's only a delayed lockdown of a window from the outside in one of the adjacent rooms. He can't be too sure, but it makes him see a flaw in his plan.

_They might still go in when they lock us up. They could move faster than us and catch up before we're gone._

_The plan has to be as flawless as possible_ , he knows. And he still alters it in the last moment, contrary to his methodical nature. Sara would call him creative. He's not. He's only trying to survive and take two more people down that path. Unlike the last time he'd been doing a thing like that, he really has no intention on dying on Sara, again. Once has been more than enough.

It's not that difficult, and not such a waste of time either, to find an unblocked floor heating shaft. Kelly had no time to seal them all over his part of the clinic in the little time before the air support arrived. He's not going to Sara's office any more.

He's going to Kelly's private office somewhere in the wing open to the general spoiled public. _The place with the red couch_ , Sara told him.

On the contrary, it is rather difficult to go through the floors with a metal bar on his back, but it's too risky to leave it somewhere, and he'll have to endure it. It's an essential tool for breaking out, unless he gets unexpected help from the outside. Luckily, he doesn't get lost, and he believes he can make it back in even more limited time frame now that he has studied the way.

The air-conditioning switches are plain visible on the wall near the infamous sofa, in striking red tones. Modern design stuff. _Very pricy_. He imagines Sara on it. It's definitely not her color, not at all, but there's something both perverse and tender about the picture in his mind. It stirs his overburdened senses, stretching them further then ever before. It increases the irrational longing to _get out, get out get out_. As soon as he can. He almost forgets why he returned to St Agatha's to start with. And he needs her to wait for him, nearby.

He has needed that ever since Fox River.

It's not hard for an engineer to figure out which button must have been pressed to jam the air flow in the clinic, on that day when he saved Sara before the medics did, when he still had no idea who he was. Before he does it, there is another thing that attracts his attention. The wall is different above the empty desk, the paint and the stucco decoration under the ceiling is all wrong, and there must be something behind it, hidden. So well hidden that it merits a minute of the time he's running out of. Careful fast probing reveals a hidden handle of a small closet, probably with medical supplies, that shouldn't be in any CEO's office, even if her part-time profession among many others is to be a brain surgeon. It's a completely flat handle, it opens if you press it in, revealing the contents behind.

He dares a quick look. A minute to learn something about his enemy can be of importance. The contents teach him less, no more, about who Kelly Davis may be. Still he stores all of it in his overabundant perceptions library, because he can't help it anyway. There's this addict stuff Sara had been using, as far as he can tell. _Unused_ , if he's right, _at least lately_. But there's other also stuff marked as strong local anesthetic with a name he has never heard before. And why should he, he's an engineer, not a physician. _Recommended for epidural usage_ , it says. A commercial leaflet promises that the patient will loose feeling in any part of the body where the liquid is injected. Smaller letters on the bottom tell him that the drug is experimental. Perhaps illicit. That would go well with Kelly Davis and her machinations. The package is small, it contains both the stuff and the needle required to administer it. He decides to take it. They might need it if someone gets injured. Or he might need it as a proof in court if he ends up in prison again.

The last look at the office makes him wonder where the CEO went. Perhaps she abandoned the clinic and left it to the special forces. Something tells him she did not. One way or another, she's not there and Michael has no time to dwell about her whereabouts.

Half an hour, max, his brain starts ticking.

He believes he can hear steps in heavy military boots approaching Kelly's office, when he finally pushes the button, stopping the air flow in the clinic. Just like the CEO must have done when she nearly hurt Sara. Inner doors will soon slide shut, and the military will not be able to enter the closed wing of St Agatha's so soon. They will need masks, or they will have to unblock the windows if they want to catch them alive and breathing. Either way, they will loose time.

But Michael has no intention of being caught ever again. He has to hurry back with the bar on his back if he doesn't want T-Bag and Roger to choke, and if he doesn't want to choke with them.

He is swift and calm because he knows his calculations are good.

He has just enough time.

xxx

**St Agatha's, T-Bag's room (cell)**

T-Bag is shamelessly crying when the door bursts open. His lungs feel constricted, and he doesn't know if it's from despair, or if they put rebel patients of St Agatha's in gas chambers. Someone did that to people in Europe, in some war. _Or was it in Iraq?_ he thinks hard but he can't remember who it was, and he doesn't really care. He was never that good at school.

Scofield's face in the door is like an angel come from above, and T-Bag's genuine hatred for the man has never been as low as at that moment.

"Let's go," the bold angel says, and T-Bag runs out. He would follow the devil himself if he came to get him. The stairs and the passages are all the same, meandering, climbing, going down. T-Bag has no idea what Scofield does to open the cell of that older man, Roger, the guy who put a word for saving good old Bagwell, not knowing any better. The man is coughing on the floor, seated calmly, saving his breath, the exact opposite of what T-Bag did before his unwilling savior knocked down the door.

"Let's go," Scofield says again.

 _Not very creative today, are we?_ T-Bag thinks cynically, his spirit getting back, indomitable, kicking, the captivity of negativity pushed deep down inside. Even his vanity gets flattered when he notices how the old man, Roger, eyes his shirt. _Sorry, man,_ he thinks, _I like my men younger… And my women in any form and shape_ , he adds, mentally, _from the very young to somewhat more_ _mature…_ He licks his lips when he thinks that soon, soon he might find _love_ again. Or what passes for it in his case.

Scofield slaps him on the back, and he realizes the air is still stiff and unhealthy, and it means that probably they have to be going. They must be returning up the same set of stairs they used to get down to Roger's cell. Or some other. It doesn't matter. T-Bag follows the two men blindly, his breathing shallow and fast.

Until through the thinner part of the hospital walls, and behind the blocked windows, they can hear it.

The ominous sound of a chopper getting closer.

"Stop," Scofield shouts quietly, as only he can boss around men breaking out with him. They do, and the sound is less.

They move and the sound follows them again.

Scofield asks Roger, his baby blue eyes all serious: "Have they ever injected you with something out of usual here in St Agatha's, lately, or maybe at the beginning, when you came here?"

"Several times," Roger says, "why?"

"The very first time, when was it? The needle should have been odd or bigger than the standard ones for blood work and similar." Michael says. "More important, where was it? I mean, in which part of the body?"

Roger points out at his right hip, and Scofield goes all green like his eyes when the light of mercy abandons them. T-Bag has seen that expression before, in Fox River. That's not good at all and he gets scared again. Something is not going according to the plan.

"Trust me," Michael tells Roger, "it's the only way to see if I'm right about this. And if I am, it's the only way for you to get out of here tonight."

Roger nods solemnly, and Scofield instructs him to lay on his stomach and not move. Whenever he moves, the chopper seems to be coming nearer. Finally, Scofield instructs T-Bag how to secure Roger in place. T-Bag almost has to turn his head away at the disgusting thing the fish is doing. With a long thin needle, he injects a slimy looking product in the bottom of Roger's spine. The older man gasps, and fights to keep his composure, eyes dark, and almost dead. _Dangerous_ , it occurs to T-Bag for the very first time since he met Roger: the _killing_ gaze directed at his shirt pocket is no longer understood as a lover's fancy. It might just as well have a more sinister meaning. T-Bag unwillingly fingers the little card there on the inside, and wonders if Roger knows what he has, what it is, and if it's a new valuable, that can either get him killed or secure his leisurely existence until the end of his days if he can find a good buyer.

The chain of his dreamy thoughts gets interrupted because Scofield is done. Roger ends up paralyzed from the waist down, and they have to carry him between them, _as a sack of grain, or potatoes_ , T-Bag thinks, appreciating the new disability of a man who just might be a bigger problem than Michael knows. _It's good to know something Scofield doesn't_ , he thinks, _you never know when it will come handy._

They take another set of stairs and they keep on climbing.

The helicopter is no longer after them, and T-Bag finds it difficult to believe their luck.

The other staircase is also close to the façade of the clinic and its blocked windows. The propellers can now be heard circling above the clinic, every so often, blind for the moment as to the location of their prey.

**On the roof**

A gust of fresh air is a blessing in Michael's lungs when he _finally_ pushes open the door leading to the roof. They had only one or two more minutes before they would start fainting from the deterioration of the air on the inside, his inner calculus states firmly. He hopes his companions, the one he wanted, and the one which was forced upon him, as usual, don't get that part of reality. The last thing he needs is a hysterical human rights worker and a hysterical lunatic on his back. Somehow he doesn't think either Roger or T-Bag are mentally equipped to deal with such a situation in cold blood.

The roof has high chimneys. Normally, they would not be needed at all on a modern building like St Agatha's hospital. Luckily, the commercial requirements of selling the establishment as a castle to the rich with no better way of spending their money have demanded a few concessions to the functionality and the design of the place.

"Stay right here and don't move," he commands T-Bag and Roger. Roger can't really move on his own, but T-Bag can and it's important that he _understands_ that he shouldn't.

"Why not?" Bagwell asks immediately.

"Let's say that if you do," Michael says as cold as he can, and he hopes that his gaze is menacing enough in the light of a pale moon on the rise, "you'll get as fried as if they put you on the chair. Would you like that? If you want a more elaborate explanation, if you move, you will stand in a field of an alarm system you're unable to cross without my assistance, so it's for the best if you don't try."

T-Bag's face starts looking green enough, and Michael hopes it means he was sufficiently convincing. He has no time left to loose either way. Two helicopters are now circling meticulously over the entire hospital, and a few others make larger rounds, including the surrounding woods.

He moves forward, and slanted, left and right, backward and forward again, avoiding both the pattern of the invisible infrared beams he knows to be there, and the occasional light projected by the chopper passing above.

He inspects the north side first, and he's wrong. The trees are just too far away for the amount of climbing rope he has, and a little bit too short for his liking. They are taller than the wall as he estimated, but from close by their branches don't look strong enough.

He almost regrets not checking all that the night before when he was with Sara. He stops regretting it instantly because he's still not caught, despite his many shortcomings. He's unharmed, and nothing is more important than having been with his _wife._

 _She loves me_ , he remembers, and he is back in no time to the shadow of the chimney where a frightened T-Bag, and an oddly calm Roger are hiding. _Just a little bit too calm for a civil society worker who has just been paralyzed by an injection given by a man he barely knows_ , Michael's perception tells him, but he has no time to dwell on that. He can only hope that the amount of rope he has will be enough to cross to safety on the south side of the walls before the helicopters close on their position by pure chance.

"T-Bag," he says, "you've got to calm down." He tries hard to sound kind and reassuring because Bagwell has to stop shaking if they are to cross the infrared field, dragging Roger between them. He wonders how much time he has before the experimental drug he injected him with will wear off. He didn't dare inject the entire content of the small glass bottle; he used only one measure mentioned on the packaging. He wouldn't like to reapply it, fearing the unintended consequences. They should better be far away from St Agatha's as soon as possible.

The moonlight is shining some more. That's not good either, it makes the air force job so much easier, and theirs more difficult.

The south side of the roof is at least a bit closer by to their chimney. They move as on medieval paintings Michael sometimes admired in his student days, showing the dance of death, where death would lead its victims by the hand in odd circles, over the edge of the world. He sees himself as death, as he steps from one square over the beams to another. They lift Roger after him, between them, and T-Bag follows suit, the best he can. Luckily, even _Theodore,_ the creep, is rational enough not to improvise, when it's his own skin on the line and not somebody else's.

When they stand oddly, in a curved line, next to the last chimney before the south edge of the roof, Michael halts. He bends and almost topples over, tying one end of the rope he's been carrying around the chimney. He carefully pulls the rest towards himself, well over the infrared beams crossing not too high above the surface of the roof. The last few steps to the edge will be the most difficult to make because he has to keep the rope up and above, not to trigger the alarm, while continuing the sinuous pattern of the three very different men linked together, for the time being.

They continue their awkward dance for another four squares of unsafe space, until they finally come to the narrow edge of the roof where the alarm field ends.

Michael looks carefully over the edge, never touching the parapet where another security system begins, and his breath stops. The trees are tall and thick enough on that side. But the length of the rope he has may just prove too short to reach over a relatively small distance between the roof and the sturdy branches. He was hoping it would be somewhat closer, and that he could bridge it easier.

The most important thing is to cross the chasm higher than the height of the walls and the roof itself, preferably on the imaginary line stretching from the top of the chimney to the branches of the tree. For the wall itself may be secured from its top to bottom, but the air above it is free of danger. From his room high up in St Agatha's, Michael observed the owls and the bats flying at night often enough, to know this to be true. Back then, when he only woke up from a coma, and when he was trying to wiggle his toes. The ones he still has.

He hopes he can do it right the first time.

Tie the end of the rope he has to the pole on his back and throw it high enough, and far enough, that it gets entangled in the tree so that they can cross, attaching themselves to it by the sheets he's carrying, one by one, sliding to freedom. It would be easier with two ropes, one above the other, to walk on one and hold the other for support, but with Sara's office blocked he has neither the professional gear to secure it that way, nor enough rope.

If not, he has to pull the bar back and try again.

He's hesitating only for a moment too long.

"What now, Scofield?" T-Bag asks.

"I think I can almost feel my legs," Roger says, hopefully, his eyes a mirror of inner goodness.

"It would be better if you didn't," Michael says seriously, "not yet."

The time for hesitation is over and he has to throw the pole. Before he does it, a whisper stops him, a whisper from a tree across. He thinks he must be dreaming but he's not.

"Papi," Sucre says. "I'm up here. I have a light but I'd better not put it on. I have stuff you needed with me."

"Rope, wire, launching gear?" Michaels rattles as if he's remembering Saturday's shopping list. Bread, honey, milk… Some beer if Linc shows up and they watch some TV together…

"All that," Fernando mutters. "Even some hitches."

"Can you, can you…" Michael asks, "shoot a rope and a wire to the top of that chimney, as far up as you can, higher than the roof level?"

"How difficult can it be?" Sucre says with confidence. Michael knows his best friend has no idea how to attach climbing ropes or wires to a surface with any tools he might have brought, but he also knows that his courage surpasses his knowledge, and even his dexterity.

Moments later, a rope and a wire spring between the trees and St Agatha's, ending up fixated almost at the same point on the top of the chimney. Michael manages to separate them at the edge of the roof, where he and T-Bag are standing next to Roger, so that there is some four foot of space between the two lines. With Sucre adjusting the edges a little bit on his side, the way out is made. The rope and the wire are above all the security systems of St Agatha's and they can be crossed as easily as a climbing device on a children playground, using the bottom one to walk on, and the top one for hand support.

It's just better if they don't look down while they're doing it. Michael knows that no brain surgeon would patch him if he falls. _Not this time._

Their way to freedom is delayed by a slow approach of a helicopter which they survive by laying next to the wall parapet, hiding under the sheets Michael has been carrying. The pilot doesn't fly close enough to see them, and the climbing equipment is of a dull grey color melting with the colors of the night, invisible from the safe flying distance.

As soon as it can be done, Michaels hauls Roger on T-Bag's back and urges him on the wire.

It is not far, a bit over seven feet, the distance to cross. Michael could almost jump over it, if he had some space to make a run for it. Almost, but not quite.

In the very last moment before they would reach Sucre on the other side, Roger grips T-Bag's neck and shirt too firmly for support, the humanitarian worker losing his calm and composure at the very end of their journey, the look of despair in the older man's eyes manifest and sincere when he gazes _down_.

T-Bag stumbles and almost looses his balance. Worse, he releases the rope, and grabs his _shirt_ instead, staggering. An expression comes to his eyes and face, as he tries to regain the hold of the rope. A cruel disappointment of one betrayed.

"Get Roger off his back!" Michael hisses at Sucre. Fernando does as he's told, and soon Roger is on the tree, safely away from the clinic that would have taken his life. T-Bag is left to his own devices for a second. Panting, he slides to the tree as well, hugging its smooth bark, somewhat below Sucre and Roger. Still, his more abrupt unplanned landing immediately puts him totally off balance, and he nearly _crushes_ to the ground. He's lucky that the canopy is thick, and his fall is delayed and softened, turning into a weird uncontrolled descent. A pitiful wail can soon be hard from where Theodore must be stuck, half way down the tree, judging by the sound.

Michael has no time to think about T-Bag. The helicopter passes his position again, and as soon as it's gone, he almost steps on the wire and he's about to catch the rope when he sees a small red dot on his right hand. He had seen it before, in Fox River, when a sniper gun was pointed at him. _And at Sara._

"I'd stay on this side, if I were you," a familiar woman's voice says from the distance, and he wonders for how long Kelly Davis has been watching them. "Let me go after them."

There's no way he'll listen to her, and he still makes a move towards that step, daring her to shoot him. He knows she could have shot him already if she wanted to, from the position she's now speaking.

It sounds like a sharp whistle of the non existing wind when the top rope is broken in two by a very precise shot, leaving only the wire in front of Michael's feet intact. He can hear Kelly's soft steps moving on the roof towards him, in the same intricate pattern he had used. She's coming closer, and she doesn't want to sound an alarm either.

But there is still no way Michael will listen. Stubborn, he takes the bar he unscrewed from his bed, and holds it horizontally in front for balance. He has to cross while she's forced to walk between the beams. The dance of the death and precision shooting don't go well together, he knows, and he has only so much time before she shoots the wire under him, or him, after all, why not. She can always adjust her plan as well, whatever it is.

He looks at the moon, pale yellow and almost level with his eyes, not to stare at the abyss below.

He's never done it before ( _Who did?_ he thinks) but it always looked easy enough when artists did it on the old fashioned fairs where Linc took him as a kid. He holds the bar for balance, and makes one, two, three steps forward on the wire.

He is half way through, and he can't hear Kelly's steps any more.

And it's worse than that, walking is not easy at all, so after the fourth step he's definitely loosing it, and the tree in front of him looms more distant then ever.

Unreachable.

"Papi!" Sucre screams, and with the last effort of will Michael stumbles forwards like an odd bird spreading its wings, bridging with his body the space he could not span by walking. Like a log, he crushes into his best friend, breathing out, relieved, his heartbeat fast and erratic from too much adrenaline in his blood.

Immediately, they are going down the tree, safely hitched to a rope next to its huge trunk, something Sucre arranged to climb up in the first place. They are not thinking of the danger behind them, hauling Roger between them.

Roger, who apparently doesn't feel his legs again, so he's laying like a dead weight on the two of them.

 _Which is only good because the helicopters cannot trace us as long as the experimental drug works,_ Michael grins, gliding downwards. _And Kelly will have to get out of the clinic to follow us. Unless she does some walking on the rope as well._

Michael doubts that she will.

A miracle awaits him when he puts both of his feet on the solid ground.

"Michael," a worried voice of a woman breathes out, and it's not Kelly's shrill of warning. "Is it you?"

"Yeah," he says, smiling, turning in the direction of the sweetest of all voices. He can't see her very well in the dark, but his wife's scent is in his nostrils. Her hands are around his neck, and his arms feel her all over her back, as they always do when they meet again after a tough moment.

"This way," she says. They move on through the forest, listening to the engine sounds above, always trying to go in a different direction. Michael and Sucre drag Roger between them, and the painful gasps T-Bag is uttering, still hanging somewhere half way down the tree, remain further and further behind them.

Michael's conscience hurts only so little for _leaving_ T-Bag behind. This time, Theodore didn't even have time to properly betray them or trick them, so there is no rational justification for abandoning him to his fate.

 _He'd try something,_ Michael tells himself, _he was true to himself in all occasions we met._

Nevertheless, as they keep on going, T-Bag's outraged face at the moment when a frightened Roger gripped his shirt is unwilling to abandon Michael's mind.

"Michael?" Sara asks gently. "Is everything all right?"

"Yes," he tells her, with love.

Wishing he was telling her the truth.

 **A/N** Please review


	18. The Pursuit and the Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the chapters I wanted to write ever since I started this story. Naturally, it took me a tremendous lot to get it done and the real life didn't help:-)) I hope you may like it.

**Roof of St Agatha's hospital**

Kelly doesn't know whether she feels disappointed or absurdly content about the outcome of the situation. She doesn't know whether she should feel pissed like hell because Michael outsmarted her as she always suspected he would. (That's why she followed him since the entire mess with the Company, and before, since Paul's infamous taking part in that murky business of Lincoln Burrows death penalty that had come to her ears. She did it to hire Michael, sort of, for what she needed, when the opportunity would present itself. As it did, with his stunt to get his wife out of prison. It makes her a little bit sad that Paul would never do a thing like that for Kelly. Not even when he believed he loved her.)

She doesn't know if she should feel happy and laugh because now at least she knows how Michael ran away with Roger and where, and she can still follow.

She has no time to feel any of it because she's got to hurry.

Ralph (Roger) never sits tight. He may be even smarter than Michael for all that Kelly knows, and he'll find a way to incapacitate his saviours and take off, _quite literally,_ she thinks, _in one of the helicopters that must contain his business associates other then me._

She keeps on making wild assumptions and bets in her mind about who will win, when Michael's great mind clashes with Ralph's for real. So far it was not necessary. Roger's focus was elsewhere, and his true character, strength of will and cunning may have escaped Michael for precisely that reason. She keeps on calculating the odds, as she folds the sniper neatly in the box and leaves it on the roof for anyone to find it. She can't make use of it anymore. The stakes are high enough to start with: four lives, including her own. And they will rise higher if those plans make it to the foreign bidders.

She double checks, triple checks, that she still has the other gun, wasting a few precious seconds on that. That one, she's almost sure she'll fire it before the night is over. She still thinks of who's cleverer of the two men, as she jumps like a cat from one field between the infrared beams to another, gaining speed with every leap she makes.

She still can't quite make up her mind about who's more intelligent (she doesn't there to hope she can match them in intelligence, but she _will_ try). She clears her mind entirely when she jumps high over the roof and over St Agatha's alarm system she doesn't want to trigger either. Eyes high up, never looking down, focusing on her goal as the time comes to an absolute standstill.

And for several long seconds, Kelly Davis is flying.

With a puff of air and a small thud, she lands harshly on the tree. The smell of its sap and foliage is in her nostrils and in her mouth, her face is bleeding from several wide scratches. All her limbs throb, and her left shoulder, which was on the front line of the crash, hurts like hell. But her legs are more or less fine, and she doesn't need her left arm for shooting a light weapon.

_Great,_ she takes a moment to relax before speeding down, she pats the perfumed bark for reassurance. "Thank you" _,_ she whispers to the tree although it can't get what she's saying.

Methodically, she uses the same rope Sucre and Michael used to descend to the ground, not bothering to pull it away after they were gone.

No one in their sane mind would expect her to jump after them, would they?

Then again, Kelly Davis has been described as a murderous bitch over and over again. And she'd always found that sanity wasn't a prominent treat of

her character.

A man is whining in the tree, half way down. She's almost forgotten about Bagwell.

"Hey" she says, "where did they go?"

"Help me out of here, little lady, and maybe I'll tell you," T-Bag sneers in pain.

"Sorry," she says automatically and she means it, a glance at the criminal revealing that one of his legs is most likely broken, so he doesn't represent a threat.

Not to her in any case.

"No time," she mutters.

When she gets down, she still pulls the rope a bit closer to Bagwell, fastening it on one of the giant roots of the tree. _There,_ she says, _go down by yourself if you can._

Because murderous bitches have motherly feelings too. Misplaced, most of the times. She hopes Esperança ran away from Helena with Adelaide when she got her message. She hopes she was faster than Ralph's business partners who would come for Kelly's family, should there be a need to ensure her cooperation with their boss returning from prison.

The grass is sparse and soft, and the two men wearing hospital shoes, dragging a third one between them, do leave some trail on it. The good thing is that they're moving deeper into the forest. The helicopter will have trouble landing or approaching Ralph on such grounds.

Kelly follows in Michael's steps like a ghost, certain to reach her prey before they exit the woods.

It is time for project Ralph to come to an end.

xxxxxxx

**In the woods**

"This way", Sara repeats and leads all three men deeper under the trees. They cross fat roots and cracking dry branches, and after five minutes walk suddenly she's less certain that she's taking their small party to where she left her car. Could it be that she is lost? That in her haste to join Michael before he would jump over the roof of St Agatha's like an overgrown cat, she didn't pay enough attention to the way she used to get there? _It can't be,_ she refuses to believe the obvious, as the trees get higher and thicker, the night air fresher, the noise of the helicopters more distant ( _at least, there is that,_ she considers) and the truth naked.

They are well and truly lost.

Michael and Sucre drag the third man between them.

They stop when she does, nonplussed, waiting for further instructions on her part.

"Where to?" Fernando asks, and Sara is grateful for Michael's silence.

In her insecurity, she looks at Roger and she doesn't like the perfunctory glance the older man is sparing for her behind. Since it's highly unlikely that any man would admire the brand and the cut of her jeans. It reminds her... well... it reminds her of T-Bag and of some other characters she'd met in Fox River.

She tells herself that quite a few men look at women like that in the streets, and that they are not all convicted felons, or evil at heart.

She tries to tell that to herself, but she's not certain.

Michael notices her unease and asks, eyes widening. "What is it?" he says gently.

"I don't know," Sara says, "I thought that the car was here. And we should have met the others by now."

"Others?" Michael asks then, and a soft expression of betrayal covers his handsome face. She had seen it before when agent Don Self turned to be a bastard working for himself rather than the government. She can't stand it directed to herself so she adds, real fast: "Linc, Alex and Paul," she makes a face when she mentions Kellerman but for the sake of honesty she adds: "He's the first one who figured there was something wrong with Kelly. Turns out he knew her in the past and she did some unsavory stuff. Much like Paul. Or worse... He mentioned children trafficking as a possibility..."

Michael's lips get thinner, when Sucre attracts the attention of both of them, searching for something all over the upper part of his body.

"What?" Michael asks. "Are _you_ Company now and pulling a gun on us?" he laughs at his friend, but the sound of his laughter rings hollow among the tall shadows of the trees.

Sara suddenly believes they may have made a full circle in the woods and came back close to the walls of the clinic. "Perhaps we should head that way," she suggests, quietly, _seriously_ , unease growing, but the men ignore her as they're sometimes prone to do.

Fernando guffaws at Michael and says: "No, papi, I thought I took a gun with me, but I must have left it in the car. I've never been much of a thief."

"No," Sara has to agree, and feel for the gun she had been carrying. It's still next to her chest, so there's no invisible enemy snatching their weapons. "But let's go now," she goes on, eager to leave the place behind, irrationally afraid that the trees are going to close on them and take her husband away for good. And that everything that has happened since she moved to Montana will turn out to be no more than a beautiful dream.

"We have to find the others," she says, "and we have to go after Mikey."

This wakes up Michael who motions to Sucre to lift Roger again. The grey hair framed face of an older man reveals nothing but pain at that moment, the pain that has to cone from his maimed legs, Sara supposes. He also gives them all a warm look of sincere gratitude. "I also think we should go," Roger says with the voice of reason. "Before Ms Davis finds us."

Sara leads them the good way now because the trees are getting sparser, and a clearing is becoming visible, not even a hundred feet in front of them.

She never gets there because a lithe black clad shape bars her way.

A cold barrel of the gun is pressed to her head, and a female body behind her uses her as a living bullet proof vest.

"Scofield," Kelly Davis says. "I'll take Roger from here, if you don't mind. It would be for the best if you and your buddy stepped away from him."

**Further in the woods, under the helicopter line of flight**

"This one," Alex says, pointing out, and up, "it's inconspicuously wrong." Paul nods his head in agreement, as they approach a clearing where a chopper is circling in all innocence, seemingly following the pattern performed by the others, over different sections of the forest.

"And it never goes too far from the landing point," Linc has to say, and wonders why he's the one appointed to do the crazy thing, and the two smart guys trained for such occasions hide behind the trees. Military training or FBI, it's all the same to him. Then again, it's his brother's life on the line now, and he never cared too much what price he had to pay if Michael's welfare was to be assured.

Linc runs in the clearing and waves his arms in the night air, ignoring Mahone's attempts to stop him, or to give him some further instructions before he's gone.

The flying metal contraption emerges from the dark sky and descends, slowly and closely enough that people inside can see him.

"It's not her," the copilot says to the pilot. "Not him either," the pilot responds, scratching his rather large nose.

"Miss Davis is delayed," Linc says, "she'll be here soon."

"And who the hell are you to call Kelly Miss Davis?" the copilot asks.

"A friend," Linc offers through his teeth, noticing that both men are heavily armed, and unsure about what they should do.

"We should shoot him," the copilot judges flatly.

It's enough to make Linc start running back to the line of trees, protecting his head with his arms, conscious of the futility of his efforts. The alarm of the chopper blares, notifying the others of their position, he guesses.

"Hey," Paul's voice booms over Linc's head before a bullet does, for which he is duly grateful. "I know Kelly well enough. If you are her men, you probably know we served together."

"He's right," the pilot says, "that was in her resume."

"The guy she shot in his head," the copilot says, chuckling, nearly laughing himself off the synthetic covered seat. "You should choose your women better!"

"Don't I know that," Paul says, coming in the open with his palms visible.

The chopper descends another several feet. when the copilot remembers his initial thought: "We should still shoot that one there."

By that time, Linc is behind a tree, panting.

"Wait!" the copilot whoops, but he can only see Kellerman by that time. In a tone fitting for a five l'clock tea in somebody's living room, he asks, "Where did your other friend go, Mister congressman?"

"What friend of mine?" Paul asks in his voice of a hitman, icy, detached. "I haven't seen anyone."

Both men in the helicopter instantly pull their weapons, but their shots are not the first one fired.

Mahone peeps out from the other side of the craft, panting almost harder than Linc. "They are alive," he squeezes out, "just not feeling very well."

"You'd better land it, boys," Paul says, "if you want us to get any help for you."

The boys listen to him, to Linc's satisfaction. It looks that they have just hitch-hiked a ride out of St Agatha's.

"Let's go back," he says, "find Michael."

"Michael," the pilot says with contempt, spitting blood, "I wouldn't count on finding him _feeling_ very well either, not once the _boss_ is done with him."

"The boss?" Kellerman asks carefully, and the expression he wears on his face then is just... well. Priceless. It's as if he had opened his mouth, his eyes and his ears, all at the same time. Shocked as Linc had never seen him before. For a fleeting moment he thinks Sara would appreciate seeing his would be murderer so humiliated... Cheated even.

And then, before Mahone or Linc can ask him what's up, Kellerman storms away from them, without any explanation. He disappears in the forest, running like a wild animal toward the place where Sara had gone maybe an hour earlier, confident that she would find Michael.

"You'd better go after him," Alex advises, "I'll bandage a bit these two, tie them up, and follow. Well, fly after you, if I can still remember the scarce lessons I had."

Linc obeys blindly, bad memories swimming back to surface. He remembers LJ's mother, and her untimely end. And he cannot help but wonder why a simple word on the lips of a badly wounded man could make a cold blooded murderer like Paul Kellerman loose his nerve.

xxxxx

_The kid is smart,_ Roger has to admit in his head, still hiding the gun he took from Sucre when he was ushered down the tree. He lays innocently on the grass floor when Kelly takes Sara as a living shield, a hostage. He suppresses a smile when Michael slams in his wife's body, trying to wrench her away from her kidnapper.

Kelly Davis is a bitch, and her grip only tightens. "Step back, or I will fire," she informs Scofield.

"Michael," Sara murmurs softly in her husband's arms, "you will always be in my heart."

"I love you," Scofield blurts, prudently taking a step back, then most imprudently stepping between Ralph and the two women. The Portorican steps right next to him, effectively blocking Ralph's line of shot to Kelly Davis, the only danger among them all.

Even if he kills any of the three of his saviours, there is no guarantee that his first or second bullet will permanently damage Kelly, and if he misses, her first shot will find him for sure.

Still pitifully half paralysed on the ground.

So Ralph has to play it differently, and like so many times before, the destiny winks at him when the honorable con Michael Scofield straightens up, holding a weapon he must have gotten from his wife.

Kelly just smiles that black eyed smirk of hers, full of disrespect and knowledge, and says: "I saw you getting it. Do you really think you can incapacitate me before I can shoot Sara?"

"No," Michael says calmly, "but if you do, I have a chance I can't possibly miss to kill you the second after. So if you want to live, I suggest that we talk."

Sensibly, Michael moves a little bit forward, and Ralph's line of sight to Kelly's head is almost clear, the prickly black hairs standing up behind Sara's beautiful face. _Maybe she's the one he should take with him for pleasure,_ he thinks with the lower part of his body, and not with his brains.

"Our common friend," Kelly says pointing at Ralph, "Roger," she says (and Ralph is oddly grateful that she's not giving out his real name), "he has something that belongs to both of us, and I don't intend to let him leave St Agatha's on his own."

Michael starts looking from Kelly to Ralph, nonplussed.

"Yeah?" he asked as if he doesn't fear for his wife's life. But Ralph has read enough on Michael Scofield to know that he does. And that knowledge will bei Michael's undoing. Not to mention another conveniently handy personal detail that Michael Scofield is utterly unable to shoot a man. Any man. Even at a short distance, even if the person in question is threatening him or someone he loves. _A very handy characteristics in this particular situation,_ Ralph thinks cynically, since he really wants to do for Kelly in person. _Bitch,_ he thinks, _so you would actually let me run, to still the plans for yourself when I did. You figured that wherever I hid them, I had to have them on me when I left... Tough luck..._ He always suspected it was probably so, even if it hurts his manly pride. He'd wish she was longing to have him as she pretended to, on her better days. Ralph may not be a particularly good man, even he can admit that. But at least he didn't pretend about that part of his relationship to Kelly. His desire for Kelly was the only true part of his act. As real as the fact that he'd cut her throat after being done with her, or better, why they were at it. Killing a willing partner at the top of their pleasure has always been heavenly sweet, when it could be done.

No one would cry over Kelly Davis.

"Roger," Michael asks politely, excellent in feigning indifference in his blue-green eyes. "What is she talking about?"

"I have no idea," Ralph says flatly, "I guess she's unhappy that not only one but two of her brain surgery guinea pigs are gone."

"Michael," Kelly says darkly, "I don't know about you, but I really don't want to prolong this situation. Whatever I may tell you, you'll probably not believe it. So I'll not waste my time trying. I've waited for this moment for more than five years, and I'm not leaving this place without getting what I want from... Roger."

"So if you want to shoot me," Kelly instructs Scofield, and Ralph is impressed by her orders. _So methodical,_ he has to give her that. "You have to move one step to the left, and aim above your wife's head. With some luck, you will hit the top of mine, and I will drop the gun from pain before I can hurt Sara. And with some bad luck, we'll both go down but not before I shoot Roger as well. Than you can check his pockets and see for yourself what you can find. And make you opinion about that."

Ralph says with caution and false care in his voice: "Michael, she's very dangerous. Her advice may be double edged."

"Suit yourself, Scofield," Kelly says, "you had your chance. Let's say I felt a weakness in our acquaintance when I gave it to you. I will now count to three and then I _will_ shoot."

"Papi, hold on," Sucre says, and Ralph admires the Portorican ability to buy time. "Ms Davis, please, there has to be a way we can talk this out."

The ugly southerner chooses precisely that moment to crawl out of the forest like a stinky, rabid animal, dragging his hind leg behind. "Fish," he says weakly, "you ain't going nowhere without old T-Bag."

Scofield spares him the briefest of all glances, and then he lifts the gun, and aims at Kelly's head. His hands are shaking and there is no way he can aim at his target properly, his limbs betraying what his face is not.

He can't do it.

Ralph concentrates on keeping his face innocent, knowing that his moment has almost come.

He will be free and back in business after five years. _There could be work for me in Syria_ , he thinks. _If not now, then very soon._

"I'm just so tired of waiting," Kelly sighs towards Michael as if she was a weak woman. In contradiction, her iron grip on Sara tightens further, if that is possible at all. _Indeed,_ Ralph thinks, _with my plans you can make so much more money than as a minor agent of our government and an experimental brain surgeon..._

People are so predictable, and Ralph is almost bored out of his wits. _It was so easy to trick great Michael Scofield... one of the best masterminds of our time according to the press... And nowhere nearly as sharp as mine._

What Sara says then, it's the first thing that confuses him, a little. _All doctors are born crazy before they turn into medical profession,_ he concludes. _Who'd want to help others if you can lead men and command them?_

"Michael," Sara breathes out, gasping, a cherished discovery of sorts, "There was no tumor the second time. But you should have died anyway."

And then, to Ralph's huge surprise, the biggest one in his life, Kelly pushes Sara forward, risking her only advantage. _She goes for all or nothing,_ Ralph realizes, as his would-be-sweetheart evades Michael and Sucre, just enough, and targets Ralph's battered chest, to the pocket where he has the plans susceptible to go to North Korea. Her aim is perfect, but so is Ralph's and he is faster, not having to get anyone out of his way. His bullet almost instantaneously finds the black prickly hair, making it fall to the wet forest ground, with the head still attached to it. But not for long...

Simultaneously, Ralph moves the upper part of his body just enough, so that Kelly's bullet ends in it a bit higher,d in the direction of his shoulder, just sufficiently above his heart and any vital organs. He could bleed out, he knows, hell, he probably _would_ bleed out, if he was left left to his own devices in the middle of the forest. But his men are there, in the woods, approaching, he can already hear the propeller of the helicopter, turning at high speed.

Michael Scofield and his useless friends are _dead meat_ as soon as the chopper comes.

"Help is on the way," Ralph lies through clenched teeth, enduring the pain. It's been a while since he's been shot and he has to give credit to Kelly for that. Very few people lived long enough to put steel in his body. Three, maybe four. All dead now. Just like Kelly.

For a second, he closes his eyes, accomplished.

But his joy doesn't last because there is a sharp pain spreading, blossoming in his neck. Blood is warm on that spot, but it cools down way too rapidly, way too fast. He knows a second too late that the pain had started even before he finished his lame sentence about the help coming. Not that the knowledge could have helped him in his predicament. His conscious mind swims in nothingness, rapidly declining and fading.

It's the last thing that Ralph sees with his own eyes: sad, smart, blue-green eyes of Michael Scofield towering over him, still holding his wife's gun with pale trembling hands.

The gun that killed Ralph Myers for good.


	19. Staying Awake

**In the woods near St Agatha**

_The barrel of the gun is still warm_ , he thinks. Or maybe it's not, it's just his imagination that it should be warm. He has no idea how a gun should feel after firing it as he's never done it before. All that remains is an idle hope that he had been right as usual. Because if he wasn't, he has just _killed._ Worse, he murdered an innocent man.

Michael allows himself a glance behind, away from Roger's corpse, still twitching. Slowly, he turns his back on the dying man. What's done is done. And it makes it a lot easier not to look at it more than it's absolutely necessary.

Sara is tending to Kelly, in a detached paramedic way. Davis' black burglar catsuit flies open like a cracked sea shell, her blouse gets torn, firmly pressed and attached to an ominously dark red patch blossoming over very dark hair on the left side of her head.

Her bare chest moves, meaning she's still breathing.

With Sucre's help, Sara is gently placing Kelly in a half seated position, cradled in Fernando's arms.

Michael notices with unease how Kelly's eyes spring open at that change of posture. That's when she commands him, as she's never done before. Her normally unfriendly voice is peeping and failing. But the force of sheer decision contained in the barely audible words she utters is resembling that of a military general or a sea captain about to sink with his ship.

"Get out of my way, Scofield," Kelly manages to say.

Michael obeys her while all his senses register brusquely that she still has a gun. And she has it pointed at Roger's unsteady corpse, holding it in one hand. A bullet flies past, burying itself in the dead man's chest, right where his hospital shirt used to have a pocket, now a ruin of flesh and fabric, and a small dark something made of hard artificial material.

The sizzling of the shot frightens T-Bag, there's no other way to describe it. Michael observes how Bagwell mutely clutches at his heart, pressing both hands over that same pocket in his own shirt, intact, and _empty._

Michael's lips stretch to a vain knowledgeable smile, and he almost knows he must have been right, as he mostly is. It's only then that his hands dare dropping the gun he had been holding all the while in the soft summer grass. Both of his arms finally allow themselves to start shaking uncontrollably when he does that, like leaves in bad weather. He'd like to succumb to his grief because he never wanted to murder anyone, never knew he had it in him, whether it was needed or not.

 _Good that you did,_ he tries to tell himself, but the desire to cry doesn't go away.

It's that one brief look at Sara's beautiful face, lovely even when she's all pale with worry. It's that look what gives him the strength to continue, because they're not yet out of this mess. Far from it.

He immediately realizes why Sara is helping Kelly. It's not because she understood Michael's reasons for choosing to shoot the man for whom he risked his life to help him escape only a few hours ago, instead of pulling a trigger to stop a woman threatening his wife. It's not because she's grateful to Kelly for saving Michael's life five years ago as she said trying to influence Michel's targeting decision. Sara wants Kelly alive because she's the only one who knows what interests her most. More than her own life, perhaps.

"Where is Mikey?" Sara asks with coldness, and that's the only reason she's keeping Kelly alive. It's not the compassion she undoubtedly possesses, or the doctor's ethics, or maybe it is a bit of all that because Sara is _kind._ But the main reason is Sara's need to find her son. Michael has to admire and fear the force of her motherly instincts at the same time. He hopes and he fears that she would turn against him with equal passion if he ever were stupid enough to endanger their son. The boy he yet has to meet, and the prospect fills his soul with unspoken wonder.

"Wait," he tells Sara, noticing what the dying woman is looking at, "give her your phone."

 _You can always count on Sara to carry a phone,_ he thinks wildly, remembering all the times he called her when he was on the run. He inhales the freshly scented forest air, smelling of freedom. He fills his lungs with it as much as he can. _No captivity of negativity around us,_ he reflects, toying with the preposterous intellectual expression T-Bag had picked up in his short lived career of a business genius.

Sara does as he says, and Kelly has it in her to drop her own gun, grab the phone instead, and type a number in the small gadget she was offered. Her other arm appears to be injured, and she has no use of it. Wordlessly, she hands the phone back it to Sara. A thick motherly voice says on the other side of the line. "Kelly?"

"Where is Mikey?" Sara repeats doggedly over the phone.

"Where is Ms Davis?" the voice asks back, less friendly than when it answered the call.

"She won't be with us much longer if you do not answer my question," Sara states flatly.

There is a long silence before there is an answer, a careful one. "The children are okay. No sign of Ralph's men where we are."

"And where is that?"

"Ms Davis knows," the voice says.

"Who the hell is Ralph?" Sara asks, and then there is a clicking sound when the line goes dead, the entire conversation kept short enough, so that the location of the number they called cannot be determined in case that anyone has been trying.

Michael dares to look again at the man he killed, swallowing bile and a pounding feeling of guilt, and he suspects _that_ is _Ralph_ , but he cannot know for certain. Not until someone can confirm his new assumptions, but the only person who could shed some light on it seems to be slowly dying in Fernando's arms.

Meanwhile, Sara tries to call the number again, once, twice, thrice. There is no answer, only a soft beep of a line which is busy, or out of order. Fernando holds Kelly, her black eyes oscillating between awake and unconscious. T-Bag just keeps wailing on the ground, pointing at the most likely broken leg, failing to impress anyone with his antics.

The chopper comes closer and it's the sound that finally sets Michael in motion.

They have no idea who's coming, if they're friendly or not. More likely not, so they have to go, and fast. But not before he takes a precaution of his own. He feels for the strange anaesthetic product from Kelly's closet in his pockets. He finds it and and he knows he's very lucky to still have it after the walk on the rope. He doesn't explain anything to Sara and Fernando. He just nods and makes his way forward to St Agatha's CEO, and they trust him to do what is needed.

When he injects another individual dosage of the product in Kelly's spine, he believes he sees a nod of approval in her half dead eyes. Her legs go limp in minutes. Not that they were of much use at any rate as she can't really walk with a bullet in her head, can she?

"We move over there," Michael says with his usual authority in uncanny situations, and grabs Kelly's lifeless legs. Fernando and he carry the thin woman behind the trees. She seems to be weighing less than her suit, and Sara just keeps the bandage on her head, repeating or pleading, obsessed with worry. "You can't die, you can't die, you can't die now."

Her voice keeps the other woman awake, and Michael sees clearly how Kelly fights to keep her eyes open, trying to do just that. Trying hard not to die.

T-Bag crawls behind them, incoherent as usual. _He'll survive anything,_ Michael thinks bitterly, _no worries there. But if he didn't creep out of the bushes when he did,_ he corrects his hateful thought, _I might have made a mistake..._ He wants to cry again, but when he thinks hard on what he did, he'd rather live and suffer for what he'd done, than lay in the dew covered grass like Roger. He knows, oh, he knows... Had he murdered the wrong person, he would not be alive any more to feel any regrets. And good chance is neither would his wife nor his best friend.

They hide on time, and Kelly's eyes are still open. Naturally, it's T-Bag who's too slow. Someone is running towards them, real fast. There is no escape. Their guns lay forgotten in the clearing, three guns and a single corpse.

Be as it may, Michael thinks he's done shooting for the day. He hopes he is done with it for the rest of his life.

Once was more than enough.

xxxxx

"Kelly!" Paul screams in the direction of the shrubs from where a pair of bony southern legs is still protruding.

He leaps and he's there in a second. He jerks Michael away from _his woman_ like a jealous bear, and shouts incoherently: "What have you done to her?"

"Not him," Kelly stutters, softly, and Paul squats in front of her, not seeing anyone, not seeing anything, taking in the head wound. Not so many years ago, it was he lying with a bullet in his head, it was she who shot him, and she who did the talking.

He'll do the talking now. It's the least he can do.

"You have to stay awake," he instructs her with the calm he doesn't feel but it's the only way forward. "Help is on the way."

She opens and closes her eyes. She opens them again, hopefully understanding. The woman he remembers from their military training would.

He says, to her, and for all of them to hear, in case that there's any doubt left.

"You've worked for the government ever since, haven't you?"

She doesn't react, but her eyes remain open.

"That's the only explanation, isn't it? You've never turned to working for your own profit or against this country as you let everyone believe..."

Her eyes blacken further, all shine gone from them, but they don't close.

"Just that I was too stupid to figure it out," Paul concludes miserably, and notices how all the rest of them, Scofield, Sara, Sucre, even T-Bag look at him as if he had sprouted horns on the bold part of his head. Only Scofield's implacable watery eyes contain an expression akin to understanding what he means.

"It's okay," Scofield says and adds as a form of utmost consolation he can offer, "I almost didn't figure it out either until it was too late."

Paul hates Michael for that, and he hates himself more for not being smarter, just this once when it mattered to him.

"And we can all count ourselves as lucky that our friend Roger did not figure it out until it was too late for him," Scofield concludes.

"That would be the boss, I guess," Paul says bitterly.

"The boss?" Sucre asks. "Like a mob boss?"

"Whatever," Paul says. "Kelly's father was one. A mafia boss involved in drug trafficking. She hated him, hated that. She'd never let anyone working for her refer to her as the boss."

Then, the helicopter is above them before Paul can finish explaining. Fernando pulls Kelly backward. Her eyes widen in shock, and Kellerman immediately stops him. "It's okay," he says then, "it's Alex piloting the thing. Help me!"

"I suppose you took the thing from the guys who worked for Roger?" Scofield says, and Paul loathes him more than ever for understanding _everything_ without needing to think twice.

"I thought that the guys worked for her," Paul says, mortified. "Until they mentioned their boss... It could not be her. It was never her. It were just my stupid assumptions..."

"Come," Sucre says then, realizing the more profound reasons for Paul's pain than the obvious ones Michael put forward, with some sixth sense only the truly warm hearted people possess. Special agent Kellerman was never one of them. He'd love to carry Kelly to the chopper himself, but he's got to admit it's probably not the best thing to do in her condition.

"Come, we'll all help," Sucre says. And then they all gently transport Kelly back to the clearing, as if she was a fallen friend, and not a former enemy. Alex lands noisily, steady as it goes, crushing some branches on his way down. The sound of the other helicopters travels closer, probably picking up on the roaring sounds Mahone had made manoeuvring the damn thing. _Some lessons he had,_ Paul thinks before all of his attention turns to Kelly again.

There's no room inside for more than one passenger, and Paul intends to turn the copilot seat around so that he can support Kelly. He has no choice but to tell them, with the authority of a former murderer, rather than an honourable congressman.

"I'm flying her to a surgeon, a friend of mine," Paul informs them dryly, getting out his official phone. He wants the man to know who's calling in the ungodly hour. "I hope he's remotely as good at his work as she's always been. Maybe she'll make it. I'll be back for all of you as soon as I can."

"Please," he tells Kelly when they carefully load her in the tiny passenger compartment, lacking the force to check if her black eyes are still open. "Just stay awake, will you? Just this once."

xxxxxxx

"So she's not," Sara asks her husband when the chopper's gone, "she's not what she seems?"

"We'll talk about everything later," he tells her, gently, "but if she was, you wouldn't be here with me, would you?"

"I mean, she wouldn't hurt Mikey, would she?" Sara asks, her composure about to break.

"I very much doubt that she would, especially now. I think she may have just succeeded in what she needed to do, you know, when she fired at Roger's pocket," her husband answers cryptically, holding her closely, needing her, or needing to underline his words with gestures.

It's because, at times, words are just not enough.

It's only then that Sara sees another figure standing shyly two steps away from them. She wonders how long he's been planted there, watching them, unsure how to announce his approach. Linc's broad shoulders fill her field of vision just before the other helicopters close on their position.

He just keeps standing behind his brother's back. He _must_ see it _is_ Michael, alive and well after all this time, just like she discovered when her husband came to her through a tunnel under the wall. Lincoln stands there, and he doesn't make a move. Probably afraid that his dream will end if he does. Sara knows exactly how he must feel so she hurries to break down the ice.

"Linc," she says, and Michael's grasp on her immediately weakens.

"Linc," she repeats, when Michael nervously turns around.

"Linc," Michael says in a voice thick with indescribable emotion.

Sara has to wonder if he truly recognises his brother, or if Lincoln

is still only one of the names and the faces of strangers related to him. People whom Michael had seen on photographs when he learned about his own past from the mass media.

Her doubts are dissipated when the two men embrace each other. Sucre soon joins in a collective bear hug, which turns into a muttered laugh, and then into a friendly fight. It's something only men are capable of doing when they meet again. Sara has to smile.

Their joy doesn't go away when they are all being lit by a spotlight, rounded like dangerous suspects, and transported somewhere by the larger of the two other helicopters. Lincoln tells them everything should be all right because those choppers belong to the government, according to Alex and Paul, and not to some criminal network. And they may have unwillingly done a favour to that same government if it's true that Kelly had been working for them all along.

Sara would wish to believe that, but all her experience tells her differently.

A blond female attendant Michael seems to know from the clinic starts asking them many questions from the copilot seat while they are on the way. She wants to know where Kelly is, what Roger had in his pocket, why two people fired at him, and several other things. They don't have the forensic details yet, so they don't know who fired, Sara concludes, happy that it is so. It gives them a little bit of time.

To her chagrin, the blonde woman soon discovers that Sara, Linc, Sucre and T-Bag truly know _nothing,_ and Michael just shrugs. As indifferent to her questioning, to her promises and threats, as when he committed the bank robbery all those years ago and stood in court refusing to defend himself. Awaiting the conviction he needed to help Linc out of Fox River. Sara adores his stubbornness despite all the trouble it had brought them. Because it has also brought them together, time after time.

"I've got nothing to say," her husband says stiffly. "I'll talk to Ms Davis when you find her. She's the one who treated me in St Agatha's since I awoke from a coma, as far as I know."

His lack of response naturally makes them all end in a brig. A very different one from those they were all used to. It's a large modern room in a building complex not too far from Helena, Sara thinks, because they didn't fly that long. All five of them are tossed in it without any further explanation. The only act of kindness from their captors is that Roger's corpse is taken somewhere else, and not left with them, she supposes. Several hours later, cots are brought in. There are five of them and they're more suited for camping than for either a proper prison or a hospital.

"Looks like they are not used to having people stay over here," Sara mutters.

"Don't know about you," Michael tells Sara, yawning peacefully "but I could use some sleep."

He pushes two cots in one of the corners, next to one another. Unceremoniously, he pulls her down with him, all dressed and warm, somewhat queasy from the flight. He doesn't care in the least that they share the space with three more men.

As if he can read her thoughts, he says to no one in particular: "Linc and Fernando won't mind, will you? And for once I'm so tired that I don't mind T-Bag's presence."

T-Bag opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it and closes it again. Sullen as a disobedient child, he crawls to one of the free cots. His leg has been tended and properly immobilised, but no one thought of providing him with crutches so that he can actually walk. They have at least been allowed to the toilet before being take to their common cell. Sara hopes no one has to use it again during the night, as there's nothing else in the room except the five of them and their would be beds.

Despite the oddness of the facilities they're in, Michael's calm air of confidence is contagious, as Sara discovers very soon. Insistent fingers firmly knead her shoulders, they go lower and reverently find her skin under the slightly sweaty clothing she's been wearing that entire day. They don't rest until they make sure she relaxed and cast away her doubts about what could happen next.

Just before dozing off, she feels how her husband's attention drifts away from her. Distracted by the low latent inhibition, no doubt, he dedicates a most studious glare to the glass pane in the middle of a rather large and fragile looking door in front of them.

Too suspiciously breakable if one knows that whoever has caught them now has the intention to keep one Michael Scofield behind it.

"If you open it, there's an energy field to keep us in," he whispers, "it's another piece of technology which is not supposed to exist. Yet."

"Another?" she wonders, "What was the first one then?"

Pretty soon, everyone else is asleep, and they're the only ones awake in a completely dark cell, with only some blue light coming in through the door glass. It's a faint sign of hope, suggesting that not all the world is black.

It's only then that Michael whispers to her: "Someone surgically inserted in both the man I killed, Roger, and in Kelly, an electronic device to track their movements by satellite. Similar technology exist for external usage. It can be in your phone, for example, everyone knows that. But as far as I knew, the electronic chip they can actually put inside a living body, I mean, without leaving any trace and causing too many health problems, did not exist. That's how the helicopters followed us in the clinic at first. That's how they came after Kelly in the end when the effect of some medicine she must have taken on purpose wore off. And now they don't know where she is."

"The anaesthetic?" she asks, assuming, needing to understand more.

"It was in Kelly's closet, well hidden in her private office," he says. "She _must_ have known about what has been done to her, and Roger didn't. The device apparently jams or malfunctions if the part of the body where it has been inserted is put to sleep and unable to move... She's a doctor so she may know another way..."

"And she gave you a hint when you returned to the clinic of your own free will," Sara's whisper becomes excited, "when she said if you suffered from a different illness, a more serious one, that then you wouldn't be able to walk through any passage in the hospital. Michael, she _helped_ you-"

"-as much as she could in a totally supervised environment," Michael says. "It appears that her employers watched all of us, her as much as me."

"But if she dies now, no one will know," Sara says bitterly, "they will charge us with god knows what and-"

"Paul will help," Michael says stubbornly, unwilling to lose his calm. "Hey, we've been through much worse," he says, and he sounds so unbearably young and vulnerable. She shivers, and he's only hugging her tighter.

She can't deny the truth in his words. But she'd still like to be out there in the open, driving her old car to fetch her son from wherever Esperança has taken the children. Michael would be in the passenger seat, teasing her. And then, they would go somewhere for summer holidays, like a real family.

"And if Paul doesn't help us?" she has to inquire.

"Then I guess I'll have to think of a way to deconstruct this field once we got some rest. I wouldn't want my wife to catch a cold in the middle of summer, from all that walking in the woods at night," Michael says, eyeing the high tech door with a stubborn jut of jaw.

Sara chuckles, and buries her face in his neck.

She has never loved him more.

 


	20. The Morning After

**A cheap looking clinic in Helena, Montana**

"She's a lucky woman," Paul says to Richard, the surgeon, when the doctor informs him that Kelly would make it. It's still early and it's Sunday. The expression Sunday morning starts making much more sense than usual for Kellerman _after_ hearing the good news. Even the yellowish color of the waiting room walls and the metallic green of a simple chair he's seated on seem brighter than before. He thinks he's lucky too because his only doctor friend (or what comes close to it as Paul has no friends) whom he can call upon in all circumstances is a proficient surgeon for fixing all kind of traumas.

"And she's a very well prepared woman, for any eventuality," Richard says with a wicked grin. "If that would be all, I'd be going now. I was supposed to take my wife and kids hiking for the weekend. They're waiting for me in the hotel. I guess I can count on you to sign the pay check for the private flight back to join them for breakfast."

"What do you mean?" Paul says. "She got a bullet in her head, man. Aren't you suppose to stay around to see that she gets better and stuff? I don't trust anyone else!"

"Then trust me, Paul," Richard says with a tired smile because it's been a long night, "she'll be just fine. You can see her when she wakes up. I reckon it'd be a few hours from now. She'll tell you the rest, or what she wishes to tell you. It's not my place to inform you any further."

"Doctor-patient secret?"

"Yes," Richard nods doggedly to a stained yellow wall of one of the older hospitals in Helena, poor and almost falling apart in comparison to the establishment Kelly runs in the immediate vicinity. Kellerman has learned to trust such places to get patched: the guys who are after you when you work as a special agent would not expect either him or Kelly Davis to be treated in a clinic like that.

"Okay," Paul capitulates. "Alex out there is not the best pilot I've met, but I guess he can take you further. I'll call you again if there's anything," he threatens Richard, yelling after him as the man walks out of the door, not waiting to be told he can leave twice.

The late night or the early morning breeze carries a mumbled "I've no doubt you will," to the inside. Then, after, Kellerman is left alone with his budding hopes.

And his old regrets.

He can only wait for Kelly to wake and pray that Richard had told him the true. Yes, he could ruin the surgeon's reputation, even shoot him in cold blood if he lied to him and Kelly dies despite everything.

But coming to think about it, none of it would make him feel any better.

xxxxx

**A non-existing prison facility near Helena, Montana**

Michael wakes up before Sara does, a miracle of soft shapes and scents in his arms. They both ache from holding her but he wouldn't trade that pain for anything. It reminds him that she's real. That _they're real._ He thinks he once told her that, and he takes several moments to marvel at the sensation. He wonders if he was always the first one to get up. His recollections of his life before the incident in which he intended to die stay sketchy at best several weeks after regaining consciousness. He wishes for a lifetime of rediscovery to have plenty of new memories he can treasure and take the place of those he will never truly possess again.

There's no daylight to know what's the time, and unlike in St Agatha, where the meals were punctual no matter what, there seems to be no breakfast. It's good that way. He gently pulls Sara and the cot to the energy field barring the door, paying all possible attention not to disturb he rest. She doesn't move, and it makes him happy to see her like that. Relaxed. _His._

Then, he walks to T-Bag and kicks him in the unharmed calf, not too strong, but not too gentle either. Good old Bagwell rolls a bit and grunts. "What?"

"Give me you hand," Michael commands him, and when he's offered the good one he corrects himself. "The other one."

Bagwell opens both eyes and is apparently awake enough to protest. "What the hell, Scofield-"

"-Just give me that hand," he repeats, "you want to get out of here, you'd better give me that hand."

Armed with Bagwell's prosthetic limb and the thin metal profile of the cot Sara is still sleeping on, he observes the virgin white paint on the walls. _Newly painted and newly installed,_ he concludes and decides to scrap a bit at the left hand bottom corner of the entrance, or exit from the cell. Depending on the point of view.

He works in silence, trying to ignore T-Bag who's muttering obscenities on his makeshift bed and caressing the stump with his remaining hand. The constant complaining finally stirs Linc awake, and it's no wonder his sleep is light, after being on a death row way too long for someone who hasn't done a thing. Sucre just turns around, determined to continue sleeping no matter what. Sara sighs and one of her arms searches for something in her slumber.

_Me,_ he thinks.

He realizes that while he's the first one up of the two of them, she might have been the one taking half of the night (or day, there's no way to tell in the windowless place they are in) to catch sleep. _Unable to stop worrying about our son_ , he supposes, consciously discarding the concern for the boy he hasn't met yet, and he loves him already, to the side ways of his mind.

And there it is, all of a sudden, out of the blue, or better said out of the dark bluish gray of the hole they are in, the reactions of the people he's imprisoned with make Michael feel like _home._

While he is sincerely appalled to feel at home in a place like _this_ , a cell, for god's sake, he is also pleased to let the weird sensation fill him up to the brim of bursting from positive energy. He almost feels completely normal and in control for the first time since he's woken up from a coma in St Agatha's after five long years.

_I can do this,_ he thinks, laboriously removing the paint. _I can do anything I want._

xxxxxxx

**A cheap looking clinic in Helena, Montana**

Kelly opens her eyes in a hospital bed she doesn't know.

Her hands fly up to her scalp like wild birds and descend, relieved, at the feel of the clearly shaven skin, and a professionally placed bandage on the upper left portion of her tiny scull. _Small head, even for a woman,_ she thinks with pride. _Too small target._

The next thing to do is to look around, and perhaps that's the first thing she should have done as her trained military mind shouts a serious danger warning.

Paul is asleep in an armchair put there for a visitor, and it's more than clear that mister congressman has made the staff of the obscure medical establishment she's in transform the room meant for at least two more patients into a private one. It's so much like him that it makes her sick.

There is a rounded table in the place where the other beds used to be, and on it, the inevitable bouquet of roses, white this time. _For innocence,_ she thinks absurdly, and then, more pragmatically, _the yellow ones must be out of season in Montana._

She'd stand up to throw up. She'd get up to throw them away, but then she remembers she just woke up after a surgery, and that she can't really walk due to the effects of the anesthesia,

It's humiliating, but also unavoidable when she speaks, softer than the rain voice, and her quivering voice doesn't sound like her own. Weakness is irritating, but there's nothing she can do now to make it stop.

"Paul," she calls, making her ex jump on his feet, nearly topping over the table and the stupid flowers.

"Kelly," he squeaks coarsely. She's glad to see that his neck is stiff from sleeping in a seated position, and that his voice sounds more fragile than her own. "How are you?" he asks, and she can see he's sorry for asking as though her condition were terminal.

"Better than you think," she manages to say and she would grin, but her jaw way too stiff after everything, and she doesn't want to think about her head and shoulder. "We need a van," she commands flatly, finding at least her usual determination when she has no voice to match it.

"What type?" he asks, not questioning her orders, as a well trained soldier.

"A blue one will do," she jokes, becoming that girl again. The girl who had no money and wouldn't take any from her father. The girl who enrolled to the army right after high school, before medical school and specialization paid by the military when her talent for surgery became obvious. The girl who could only distinguish cars by their color. Now she knows more about types and brands of vehicles than she ever thought necessary. She can parachute and pilot an aircraft at need, but for a second she wants to be that young girl.

"Six seated places and a large trunk. _Clean,_ " she instructs further, and the moment of youth is over before it has truly began. "And a wheelchair for me, I think," is the last thing she can add before she simply needs to sleep some more.

"Where will we be heading?" she hears Paul's voice behind her eyes getting heavy, and irrefutably closing.

"Oh, Paul," she whispers, "you definitely know the way."

xxxxxxx

**A non-existing prison facility near Helena, Montana**

_Breakfast comes when you don't want it at all,_ Sara thinks sardonically because she sees her husband squatted by the door, a look of a child caught stealing apples plastered all over his boyish face. _He must have been real close to figuring the way out of here._

It's T-Bag and not Michael who gapes and exclaims in astonishment to the guy pulling a cart with trays as though his presence were a bad joke: "Mr Morris! You... you..."

"He's alive," Sara concludes, remembering how the register in St Agatha's affirmed the contrary. She hopes this means Michael is right about Kelly and that as a consequence little Mikey is doing fine wherever he has been taken.

"I'm fine thank you, my friend," Mr Morris says to T-Bag, pressing a few buttons on the outside of their cell to push the cart with trays on the inside. The blond woman who questioned them yesterday is not far behind him. She vigorously trots into the cell as well.

"As you can see," she says in a motherly voice while Mr Morris starts serving them breakfast, and the smell of coffee finally wakes Fernando as well. "This would wake the dead," Fernando interrupts the lady, grabbing coffee, and T-Bag continues blabbering: "Right, wake the dead, that's right... No doubt about that, Ma'am."

"You all see that Mr Morris is well," the blonde continues, somewhat disturbed Sucre's and T-Bag's antics, "his treatment for brain cancer is proceeding smoothly and we would only need your cooperation to locate Ms Davis. His second surgery is due in another ten days, and if it's performed on time, he'll make a full recovery."

"I'm sorry, Madam," Michael says flatly, "we've told you yesterday all that we knew. We have no idea where she is now."

The others pull faces but no one contradicts him. Sara releases a breath she didn't know she'd been holding when even Bagwell makes a clueless expression, and does not speak, showing uncharacteristic loyalty.

"She's right here, Sylvia," a weak voice says from behind as a skinny bold woman is pushed to their line of sight in an old-fashioned wheelchair, by former special agent Paul Kellerman no less.

"Oh, Kelly," Sylvia says, "I did not realize that-"

"-of course not," Kelly says in a voice that tolerates no dissension despite being as weak as if it were coming from a grave. "I'll take them over from here. And I'll be with you, Mr Morris, before the week is over. All the extra tests we've done on you indicate that you really make a strong chance for recovery as my collaborator pointed out. You should be transferred back to St Agatha's tomorrow, if I'm correct."

"Yes, but," the blonde woman wants to say something but she has no time.

"She's a real doctor, not a fraud," Sucre blurts.

"And a damn good one," Paul agrees. "Come, all of you," he gestures them to follow him because it seems that the words have just left Kelly Davis for a while, where luckily life has not.

Sara takes Michael's hand, and the rest come after them. The breakfast and the energy field are left behind. So is Mr Morris, and an unhappy pretty blond lady called Sylvia, as their incredulous feet pad through the long shadowy corridors, towards the light in the outside world. Only Fernando is smart enough to bring his coffee cup with him.

The rest must be as hungry and as thirsty as Sara, but the basic needs are soon conquered by the impending sensation of breaking out, _once and for all_ , she dares to hope.

A dark blue van is waiting for them in a driveway of a building that looks like a large family house on the outskirts of a larger city. _Somewhere not too far from Helena_ , Sara reckons, judging by a rather short flight needed to bring them there. It sits peacefully in a picturesque nature surroundings, not resembling any public institution, and prison least of all.

"We forgot my hand," Bagwell says.

"Want to go back to Fox River?" Paul asks him, and when T-Bag shakes his head, Kellerman opens the trunk and gestures towards it. "If not, I suggest you get in here. This is the only alternative to the prison time you're likely to get. I'd take my chances if I were you."

With T-Bag safely stored away like luggage, the rest of them take seats inside the van. All except Michael who points at the perfectly dark blue looking spot above one of the tires. "There," he says. "The hue is not exactly the same as the rest."

Sara sees no difference in color, but Michael obviously does.

"I said, clean," Kelly whispers to Kellerman from a wheel chair hauled in the place of the front passenger seat. Faster than lightning, the newly made congressman leaves the driver seat, pulls a gun and shoots the patch Michael identified. "It's clean now," he grins.

Sara believes that Davis might try to smile back, if her frail condition were not preventing her.

"A listening device?" Sara asks, and Michael nods to reassure her.

Once they're all in, Kelly does her best to speak.

"Ask," she says.

"I'll help to fill you in when she can't," Paul says protectively.

"Mind if I start the talking and you add the details I'm missing?" Michael says with as much trust in his voice as he can afford to have towards people.

"Papi, you never miss anything," Sucre says sleepily, tapping Michael on his back, and swallowing some more coffee.

"It wasn't your hair, was it?" Sara's husband asks Kelly. "It was something protective, like a bullet proof vest, just for your head."

"Not protective enough," Paul says, bitterly. "While nothing vital was hurt, and the bullet was not in her head, she still bled a lot and she needed a minor surgery. Hey, if you guys didn't stop the bleeding, I don't know..."

"Had to look real enough to Ralph," Kelly manages to say and it's the longest sentence she has uttered so far. Paul jerks the steering wheel at her words, and they nearly fall off the local road, driving in a direction unfamiliar to Sara.

"Ralph?" Michael seems puzzled, at first, but not for long. "I see. To get a good line of shot at him when he thought you gone. Or not at him. Not primarily."

Sara wonders what her husband exactly means before they all listen to Kellerman again.

"You see," Paul says and Sara could swear he goes a bit pink on the bold part of his head when he tells them. "Kelly and me have this history thing. Years ago, we were together on a mission in Africa, we were supposed to infiltrate a human trafficking network. When we parachuted to the meeting point, I... I realized that Kelly did not need to infiltrate them. She's been working for them all along. To prove her point, and their loyalty to them, she shot me in the head."

"It was a ruse," Fernando says with the same conviction as when he whispers his prayers to Mary and Jesus.

"Yep," Kelly says.

"But I didn't know," Paul says, "and neither did Ralph Myers until his death."

"That's Roger, right?" Michael seeks confirmation now. "That's his real name."

"Yep," Kelly says again.

"A specialist in human trafficking hidden under an alter ego of a human right activist," Paul fills in. "But his more lucrative activity was arms trade, or smuggling plans of _very_ sophisticated weapons and weapon systems out of the US to the best buyer in the international market..."

"There was something in the pocket of his shirt," Michael says. "T-Bag had it for a while, and Roger... Ralph took it back when we ran. Kelly shot it after I... after I already killed the man. That was what she was after in the first place. To make sure no one else gets it whatever it was, I guess... And if I didn't kill him, she would have risked her life to be sure that she first ruined the thing he had."

"Yes," Kellerman says with conviction. "And believe me, you are best of not knowing what it was. I didn't ask either."

Kelly underlines his words by nodding, as much as she can. Paul continues, meekly. "You see, to understand what happened, you should know that this Ralph guy, he had a sadistic trait. He knew how Kelly shot her ex... well... me... in his head. He thought she did it for profit and regretted it later. Kelly has always assumed he would aim at her head to get at her when he decided he didn't need her any more, to mock her before she died in a cruel way... I'm glad she was right about that. And that her hairy cap device worked against that bullet... More or less... It surely fooled me it was her hair..."

"Thank you, Mr Scofield," Kelly is barely able to utter.

Sara thinks she misheard her, when she and Michael ask back in unison, and with no little suspicion: "For what?"

Davis' voice is gone again so Kellerman has to continue, definitely changing skin color at that particular point, revealing shame over an amateur behavior, Sara thinks. "For everything. For having the brains and the guts to deal Ralph his own medicine. For not blowing Kelly's cover as a heartless double agent. As you rightfully guessed-

"-With her help," Michael clarifies.

"-both Kelly and Ralph had a sensor surgically inserted in their body. It could track their movements and record the conversations they were making. Officially, the state didn't believe either of them was a good guy and they wouldn't take their chances. Not with what Ralph has stolen this time during his prison time in Iowa. He took a leaf from your book, Scofield. It was about the same time when you... when we thought you died. He got imprisoned on purpose, under his false name, Roger, for calumny against state officials whom he wrongly blamed of stealing humanitarian aid.

He used his time to hack the prison computer and connect to the military. The plans he downloaded have been immediately altered, but even after five years, the version he stole could be deadly and developed further in wrong hands. Only very few people in very high places knew that Kelly worked only for the country and that she could be trusted... Yesterday she swallowed a medicine, morphine based, mind you, which only partially hampered the effects of the sensor. But if you didn't inject her with the stuff in her back, everyone would have heard me saying how she worked for the government all the time."

"Which is the truth," Michael says and it's not a question.

"It is," Kellerman dares to agree, looking over his shoulder for an invisible wire, "but that doesn't mean she wants everyone working in St Agatha's to know that. The blonde woman, Sylvia, for example, she works for someone else, some foreign regime, we're not sure which one. The Chinese, maybe. And she won't be the only one."

"I wonder," Sara has to say, "I mean... Kelly kind of, hum... she kidnapped Michael to help expose Ralph and get those plans. Why couldn't she just ask for his help?"

"And would he help her, I wonder? With the selected parts of her CV publicly available in the media" Paul says cynically. "After the Company, and your experience with agent Don Self who hired you to work for the state so that he can make profit and Scofield can get killed? Why would any of you believe in Kelly's good intentions after all that? Sara, I _loved_ her, and I didn't believe her.

"Well, then, Paul," Sara ventures into saying, carefully considering all the revelations of the past night and day, "you almost ruined Davis' cover. If she wants to continue with her work as a double agent, or whatever she's doing for the government on a side of her _medical_ profession, you could actually help her cement the image of the cold-blooded person..."

Paul stares at Sara, not understanding. Michael does the same, to her astonishment.

Linc smiles, the first one to get what she means, in this particular case, with the pragmatic intelligence he acquired on the streets of Chicago long ago.

"Well," Sara says, "I guess the state would have lots of reason to suspect the loyalty of a spouse of a former special agent with a clouded past, currently an elected politician on the rise... And foreign clients could try to contact her to obtain whatever they want to obtain from this country..."

Paul is red as a water melon about to burst from ripeness, and Sara thinks that his eyes of a killer may be tearing.

"I don't know if she'd want that," he says, as simple as that. "When she patched my head in Africa, I didn't stay with her long enough to ask for her reasons for shooting me."

They all drive in silence for almost half an hour. The road gets narrower and their destination must be nearer.

It's only when a house comes in view, and Linc's hands get all stiff and expression empty that Kellerman says, daring to look at Davis from the corner of an eye.

"Even if, you know, what Sara just said was my line of thinking as well," he confesses, "if you would consider it."

Sara is not sure, but she thinks that Kelly's lips curl in an imperceptible smile.

"I guess what Sara said is our way to say thank you," Michael says to the back of the wheelchair, toward Kelly's bold scalp, "for putting me back together five years ago."

The smile on Kelly's face gets brighter and brighter, and the only sad person in the car is Lincoln.

"Damn it," Michael's gratitude turns into soft cursing, when he finally takes in the estate where they are parking in front.

They're in Blackfoot Montana. In the house where Terrence Steadman was hiding when he was supposed to be a dead man, murdered by Lincoln Burrows. Sara has never seen it, but Michael has talked about it so much that she can sometimes see it in her nightmares. The house where Lincoln's attorney and former girlfriend, Veronica, was murdered in cold blood.

Sara almost expects a squad of men in black to pour out of the house to welcome them, wearing black suits, dark sun glasses and huge guns, but there is nothing like that.

When the old fashioned door goes open with a creaking sound, it's the laughter of children they're hearing, and a large black woman is coming to greet them.

"Ms Davis," she says, "all is fine. No sign of pursuit."

Sara is the first one to stumble out of the car, and the first one in the house, pulling her husband behind her, not caring what the rest of their party is doing.

There is a garden in the back of the house where two children are playing ball. The boy stops immediately and stares at her.

"Mammy," he says, "who's that?"

"It's your daddy," Sara says instantly. There's no point in hiding it and no simple way to put it either, so she tries to make it as understandable to a five year old as she can. "The doctors told us he died but in the end he did not. He was just very ill so he couldn't talk to anyone for years. And he came back to me as soon a he was better."

Mikey is not sure what to believe, she can tell. Or maybe he's afraid that if he does, daddy will be gone when he wakes up tomorrow. "Mammy," he asks very carefully, "is that why you worked in a hospital again? To take care of daddy when he was sick?"

"Yes, she was," Michael helps her out. "The doctor who saved my life called your mammy to come and look after me when I could walk and talk again. That's when you moved to Montana."

"Which doctor is that?" Mikey wants to know as he makes a step towards his father.

"I believe that she's the real mother of your little friend over here," Michael says with a smile.

"Oh, this is Adelaide," Mikey said as the mousy African girl comes up right behind him. "She's my best friend at school."

"Hi, Adelaide," Michael says. "Your mom is great."

"I know," little girl says with pride before she sees Kelly's in a wheelchair. "Mom, are you very ill now?" she asks with worry in her tiny voice.

"Only a bit," Kelly says, trying to sound better than she must feel in front of her daughter. Behind Davis in her chair, Sara sees Esperança unlocking the trunk of the van.

"Hello, sweetheart," she says to a dazed T-Bag.

"Miss," he mutters, wincing. "Have we met?"

"Come here, handsome," the imposing woman says dragging him out. "Sure we did. You punched me a bit in Fox River to prove you were more insane than you really are. But it's nothing I can't handle. I thought of you as cute, you know. And Ms Davis says you can stay with me if you want, or go back to that awful place in Chicago if you so prefer."

"Well then, Miss," T-Bag says with some apprehension in his drooling voice, adapting to a new reality, "who am I to contradict you?"

And if it weren't for Linc remembering all the bad things that have happened in Blackfoot, Montana, the afternoon would be pleasant.

_It could be perfect_ , Sara thinks.

Michael puts little Mikey on his neck and goes to his brother who still lingers at the van, unwilling to enter the property. "Come on, Linc, don't be mad at me, please," he says. "I'm sorry they brought you here. I didn't know. I swear."

"It's all right," Lincoln says, trying to cope with his feelings. "It's all right", he repeats." He's still calm like a grave, but after a few minutes he comes up with a phrase, and Sara knows he means it from the heart. "This is not about me any more, little brother," Lincoln says. "This is about you now."

"Papi is back," Sucre adds, unceremoniously tossing the empty coffee cup in an elaborate iron garden garbage can that used to belong to Terence Steadman.

Little Mikey squeaks: "Daddy, put me down now! I want to play hide and seek with Adelaide."

"Only a bit longer," Michael says. "Soon we'll be going home, and Adelaide and her mother can visit us."

"Adoptive mother," Paul explains to Sara when the children cannot hear him. "After Kelly and me parted ways, she stayed in Africa and ran a campaign for children vaccination in Mozambique, to forget about our... our association. She stayed away from the US for a year. I guess that's when she adopted her daughter and her overprotective nanny as well. I was wondering... Would _you_ allow Adelaide's soon to be adoptive father to visit as well?"

"Why not?" Sara says, and it's the most she can give him. She'll never like Kellerman but he's done enough for her by then, she guesses, that she can at least tolerate him. _From time to time_.

Sara takes her shoes off and sits in the grass, warmed up from the sun, dew drying out. She'll just take a moment looking at her husband playing with their kid.

Before they can all go home.


	21. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

**Former Residence of the Governor Tancredi, Chicago, two years later**

They live in Chicago in plain sight.

Sara never thought she would inhabit the residence her father used as a governor again. It's too big and too expensive, but nevertheless, there they are. The new governor chose a new place to live, something more modern and in line with his taste. And the mortgage rate the bank gave them was favorable. Something about the crisis in real estate market, which is never ending these days, as far as Sara can tell.

After Montana, Sara believed Michael might want to move far away. To Panama, to be close to Linc, as he wanted in the times of Fox River, or even further. She was both surprised and pleased when she asked him about it, and he shook his head.

"No," he said. "We will not spend our lives hiding."

So they don't. Sara runs a small medical practice on the ground floor. As a family doctor and advisor to those who are still using, hoping she can make as many of them stop. She's been clean for several years now, but she will always feel a bit dirty when she remembers that time of her life.

Michael runs his own company too, employing a dozen people. He refuses to grow bigger than that. They build family homes and blocks of apartments. There have been many attempts asking Michael to design an institution, a hospital, _a prison,_ but he has rejected them all.

Sara understands why, and she supports him in this decision even if they could use the extra money to pay the bills, and save for the education of their child.

Of their _children._ The thought feels strange, and it's too early to tell, and so many things can still go wrong with her pregnancy, but it's true nonetheless.

Mikey is doing his homework and she's making some food for all of them. She plans to tell Michael when he comes home. She hopes that maybe the news from the two of them will also make Lincoln change his mind. He has been adamant about not having any more children. He considers himself too old. Sofia disagrees, but so far she couldn't make him see things the other way. It's different with Alex, who has lost a child, and Sara can understand his reluctance about further procreation a little bit better.

There is soft clicking in the door and just like that, Michael is home.

"Daddy!" Mikey screams, "look, I drew a bear!"

The bear looks suspiciously like a kitten, but her husband still tells their son it's a great drawing of a bear, claws and all.

When he faces her, he nervously wrings his hands, and focuses on the carpet between them. That is when she knows he intends to say something as well. She wonders if _his_ news will spoil her dinner, or not.

"Just say it, please," she says.

"What?" Mikey asks.

"I will build a road," Michael says, simply, but Sara knows that there is more.

"A road?" she inquires further.

"Kelly called," he says. "The road is in Mozambique," he clarifies. "So that people from a remote region have better access to schools and medical care. "

"Wasn't she overseeing such work herself? She contracted some local company, didn't she?"

"She was," Michael says, "but she can't do it now."

Then, he gazes at her stomach, and Sara knows what's wrong with Kelly. Or, to put it differently, there's nothing wrong but traveling to certain places can be difficult.

"Well, I couldn't travel now to Africa either," she declares, waiting for the meaning to sink in her husband's head. "Some of the recommended vaccinations are incompatible with my condition."

"What?" he says, "You too?" he stammers.

She nods.

"Well.. Vow... I don't know what to say," he admits. After two years they thought that the years on the run, or Michael's health problems have left a toll. They were never careful, yet Mikey never got a little brother or a sister.

Until now.

"We have to tell everyone," Michael says with enthusiasm. "Sucre and Maricruz will be thrilled. They've been nagging me about it for two years."

"Esperança and T-Bag can build the road," Sara states solemnly, as a judge dictating the sentence. "Kellerman can occasionally travel there to see that they don't screw up if they don't trust them to do it. I hear T-Bag has been stealing change from churches to buy cigarettes in the black market, but that's the worst thing he's done in two years."

"Okay," Michael says, sheepishly.

"Daddy," Mikey asks with apprehension she hasn't seen in her son for very long, since they got altogether again as family in Montana. "What's wrong?"

Sara realizes they spoke too loud and hurries to reassure her son. "Mikey," she says, "what daddy and I want to say is that if all goes well you will get a little brother or a sister in a while."

"I want a sister," Mikey says after some thinking. "Than I can buy girl toys as well, and not only boy toys."

"Good thinking, son," Michael says, chuckling.

"I'm going to tell Daisy," Mikey announces, running to the other part of a house, as fast as only a seven year old can.

"Daisy is getting stuffed," Sara says, slightly annoyed.

"We'll stop buying fish food," Michael agrees.

And then, she sees it's still not everything he wanted to say.

"Tell me," she encourages him to spill it all out for her.

"Kelly has never asked for anything, you know," he says. "Never tried to blackmail me, never put any conditions to setting us free after I murdered a man. Apart from the unorthodox method she used to employ me in St Agatha's, she never demanded anything else. It's just that I have been thinking after she called. I do have these unique abilities and they have been both used and abused in the past. And we know now how she's really working for the good guys..."

"Yes?" she knows where this is going and she sighs. She was always afraid this could happen, and now it's happening, against her wishes for a peaceful, boring existence.

"I mean... I thought... I wouldn't do it now, obviously," he says, crossing the distance between them, bending his head to press one of his ears on her still flat belly.

"One day," she says, halfheartedly.

"One day," he repeats. "It's just that, there are so many terrible people out there, like Ralph, like the guys who framed Lincoln and ran the Company. I should do something to help stopping them if I can."

"I know, baby," she says and she cradles her husband's head against her abdomen. She thinks she might cry because it's at that moment she remembers that those same guys killed her father.. "Don't I know that..."

"We will not hide," she says stubbornly when the moment of weakness is over.

"No," he says, and she can see the tears in his eyes as well.

"You can work for the good guys, Michael, if you wish," she finally allows it, because it's the right thing to do. And it gives her a measure of control: the trouble you start yourself may be more predictable than the trouble that finds you on its own.

"On one condition," she says, pulling Michael on his feet.

"Yeah?" he asks, staring at her eyes, too close to her face for their embrace to remain entirely innocent. And it's too early to do _that_ because it's nowhere near Mikey's bedtime yet so they should better stop it. _Now._

"Don't you dare dying on me, Mr Scofield," she says, as if mere words can prevent that from happening.

"I wouldn't dream of it, Mrs Scofield," he says and he smiles against her lips. But then, before he can say anything else, before he can make another promise he can't keep, before they can indulge in unwillingly educating their child in the ways of the grown-ups, there is a splash, and a sound of broken glass. And Mikey, who is not so little anymore, starts crying.

"Mom! Dad! Help! Daisy has fallen out!"

"I will start my new career by saving a goldfish from certain death," Michael says, "how difficult can it be?"

"As difficult as keeping all your toes," she murmurs.

Life cannot be stopped, no matter what we do, it will run its course.

Sara will help Michael when she can, she realizes. Of her own free will.

She is no longer afraid when she follows him out of the room.

**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left a kudos or read this story. I really enjoyed writing it. Stay well and god bless.


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